VOPE Partnerships

In January 2012, a group of like-minded evaluation professionals, led by UNICEF and the International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation (IOCE), came up with the idea of EvalPartners. The idea behind EvalPartners was to break down silos and harness the energy and talent of evaluators to advocate for evaluation differently and creatively. 

EvalPartners had a huge impact with the declaration by the global evaluation community of 2015 as the International Year of Evaluation.  Activities around the International Year of Evaluation culminated with the launch of a Global Evaluation Agenda 2016-2020 (EvalAgenda2020), which synthesizes the inputs of thousands of evaluators and clients of evaluation from different countries and organizations. EvalAgenda2020 constitutes the DNA of EvalPartners and lays down a road map towards the vision for the future of the evaluation profession.  The American Evaluation Association was the first Voluntary Organization for Professional Evaluation (VOPE) to develop “13 different ways to support EvalAgenda2020” and has been “walking the talk” since. 

WE is a VOPE that has participated by sponsoring one of their members, Donna Mertens, in a grant that partnered WE with the VOPE in Kyrgyzstan. After Mertens provided training in evaluation and capacity development for their evaluation organization in Kyrgyzstan, WE hosted two evaluators from Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, supported by AEA’s international partnership program (http://www.eval.org/internationalpartnershipprogram ). This is an example of the kind of initiatives that AEA and EvalPartners support. AEA and EvalPartners have an on-going grant program; WE members who are interested in this type of partnership can follow the grant announcements at the AEA website and at the EvalPartner’s website (https://www.evalpartners.org/ ).