The African Evaluation Principles and Made in Africa Evaluation

From Guidelines to Principles

African evaluation has had a continental normative instrument for two decades, and the change in its name marks a change in ambition. The African Evaluation Guidelines, developed through AfrEA’s early conferences and published in 2002, adapted the North American Program Evaluation Standards for African contexts — a translation exercise, valuable but derivative by design. The African Evaluation Principles, launched at the 10th AfrEA Conference in Addis Ababa in November 2021, replace the Guidelines with an instrument built from African starting points [1]. Anyone still citing “the African Evaluation Guidelines” as the current continental reference is citing a superseded document.

That succession is the story of the intervening two decades: the growth of a body of thought — Made in Africa Evaluation (MAE) — arguing that the problem with imported evaluation frameworks is not their foreignness as such but the assumptions they smuggle in, and that Africa’s evaluation community should set its own terms of reference for quality.

What the Principles say

The instrument addresses everyone involved in evaluation on the continent — funders, commissioners, evaluators and educators — and organises its guidance around five principles [1]:

1. Empowerment of Africans. Evaluation should involve the communities it studies and leave something behind: capability, ownership and practical benefit, not extraction of data for reports read elsewhere.
2. Technical robustness. Evaluations must be methodologically sound and use rigorous techniques. The placement is deliberate: the instrument forecloses the lazy reading that contextual grounding is a discount on rigour.
3. Ethical soundness. The highest ethical standards, with the dignity of participants respected — continuous with the global ethics instruments but stated on African authority rather than borrowed.
4. Rooted in Africa. Evaluations should be grounded in African contexts, values and knowledge systems, while drawing on global good practice where it serves.
5. Global connectedness. African evaluation is part of a worldwide profession facing shared challenges; the instrument positions African practice as a contributor to global evaluation, not an enclave within it.

Read as a set, the five principles are a deliberate braid: two of them (rooted in Africa, empowerment) carry the MAE agenda; two (technical robustness, ethical soundness) bind African practice to universal quality claims; and the fifth (global connectedness) refuses the isolation that critics of decolonising agendas sometimes predict. The instrument’s answer to “African or rigorous?” is that the question is malformed.

Made in Africa Evaluation: the intellectual foundation

The Principles did not appear from nowhere. Their foundation is the Made in Africa Evaluation agenda, and its landmark text is the synthesis paper Bagele Chilisa prepared for AfrEA in 2015 [2]. The synthesis did two things that still structure the field. First, it made the critique precise: mainstream evaluation frameworks arrived in Africa embedded in donor accountability relationships, carrying assumptions — the autonomous individual as the unit of analysis, written evidence as the privileged form, the external expert as the warrant of objectivity — that fit poorly with relational African contexts, and that can systematically misjudge what programmes achieve there. Second, it mapped the constructive positions, which range from adapting existing global methods to African contexts to building evaluation approaches from African philosophical foundations — relational worldviews, indigenous knowledge systems, community validation of findings.

Chilisa and Mertens sharpened the strong version of the argument in 2021: imported frameworks, applied unexamined, can amount to epistemic violence — the systematic discounting of African ways of knowing — and indigenous evaluation frameworks are presented not as a courtesy to context but as a corrective that changes findings and contributes to social transformation [3].

The debate, fairly stated

This is a live disagreement among serious people, and it should be reported as one.

The case for indigenisation holds that adaptation is not enough: a logic model translated into a local language is still a logic model, and the deep assumptions travel with it. On this view, whose knowledge counts, who asks the questions, and who validates the answers are not implementation details but the core of evaluation quality — and only frameworks built from African foundations get them right [2] [3].

The case for adaptation — held by many African evaluators, and visible inside the MAE synthesis itself as one of its documented positions — holds that methods are global goods with no nationality: a well-run counterfactual design or a disciplined qualitative protocol serves an African ministry as well as any other, and the real deficits are in who leads the work, whose priorities set the questions, and whether findings are used [2]. Country studies of evidence use in African governments lend this view practical weight: what most constrains evaluation’s contribution in the documented cases is institutional — demand, timing, ownership of the process — rather than the cultural provenance of the methods [4].

And both sides name the same failure mode: tokenism. A terms of reference that cites the African Evaluation Principles and then commissions the same externally led, externally validated study as before has not engaged the debate; it has laundered it. Chilisa’s synthesis warned early about ritual citation without methodological consequence [2], and the warning has aged well.

Where the field genuinely has not settled: who validates African evaluation knowledge (community structures, national associations, journals — and which journals), and how far indigenous frameworks generalise across a continent of enormous internal diversity. Treat confident universal answers to either question, from any side, with suspicion.

What the Principles change in practice

For commissioners and evaluation managers, the instrument cashes out in decisions that fit in a procurement document:

• Commissioning clauses. Cite the African Evaluation Principles (2021) — not the superseded Guidelines — as an explicit quality reference alongside the UNEG or DAC instruments, and require bidders to say concretely how the evaluation will meet the empowerment and rootedness principles.
• Team composition and leadership. Africa-led is the instrument’s plain meaning: African evaluators leading the design and the judgement, not subcontracted data collection under external analysis.
• Methods. Approaches that work in relational, multilingual settings — participatory methods, deliberative validation, evidence gathered in the languages people actually speak — are treated on this site under participatory and empowerment evaluation and feminist and gender-responsive evaluation, both of which share the Principles’ concern with who holds power in the evaluation.
• Validation and use. Findings validated with the communities evaluated before publication, and connected to national evaluation systems (see national M&E systems) so that the capability built stays on the continent.

The institutional ecosystem

The Principles live in an ecosystem worth knowing as a map: AfrEA itself, the continental association and issuer of the instrument [1]; the national voluntary organisations for professional evaluation (VOPEs) through which most practitioners connect to it; the African Evaluation Journal, the peer-reviewed venue where much of the MAE debate is conducted; and Twende Mbele, the multi-country partnership on government M&E whose work grounds the evidence-use side of the story [4]. For a practitioner, the practical entry point is the national VOPE; for a commissioner, it is the instrument itself, which is short, free and written to be used.