AlterSpark and partners to speak at an InterAction webinar on 24 September 2010, 11:00 am to 12:30 pm EST.
Oxfam Great Britain, one of 14 organizations in the Oxfam International confederation, works together with partners and allies around the world to find lasting solutions to poverty and injustice through development, humanitarian and campaign programmes in more than 63 countries. Over the past few years, Oxfam GB has been working to improve how it monitors, evaluates and learns from its programmes, including its campaign and advocacy work. As part of this process, they piloted a number of different approaches to M&E in the Climate Change Campaign – a large, high profile, complex campaign, working with national, regional and international partners to influence policy and public opinion in the UK, and more than 10 priority countries in the global south, in support of a fair, safe and binding global climate change deal.
Drawing on the literature and lessons around ‘Developmental Evaluation’, as well as their own experience, Oxfam GB focused on developing light monitoring systems able to support real time, strategic learning and inform decision-making processes during the campaign. At the same time, this capacity was complemented by an independent evaluation, commissioned to provide a rigorous and credible assessment of their climate change campaign. The evaluation was carried out by evaluators with Leitmotiv and AlterSpark, who worked with Oxfam GB to design an evaluation project capable of overcoming a number of practical challenges, and to consolidate evidence across numerous sources, including interviews, publications, surveys, web data, independent studies, and the researchers’ own investigations.
Oxfam GB’s M&E advisors, Simon Starling and Claire Hutchings, and the two external evaluators, Dr. Brian Cugelman and Eva Otero, will discuss the institutional and methodological challenges of assessing a complex global campaign, and describe both the efforts to improve real time strategic learning during the campaign, and the methodology developed to address the evaluative questions posed by the external evaluation. Gabrielle Watson, senior Senior MEL Advisor with Oxfam America, will then offer a short reflection on their own experience addressing these challenges in their Climate Change Campaign, before we open the session up to questions.
