Evaluability Assessment of the Peacebuilding, Education and Advocacy Programme (PBEA)

Evaluations initiated at the end of a period of programme delivery are often undertaken amid high hopes that strong programme results will be demonstrated and that convincing lessons will be learned about factors driving success. It can be frustrating, therefore, if weaknesses in programme design and monitoring make it difficult to measure results and discern programme achievements. To pre-empt such disappointment, careful assessment can be made of “evaluation readiness”: that is, the extent to which a programme and its results are likely to be amenable to systematic evaluation. If such an “evaluability assessment” is made early on, there will usually be time to amend weaknesses and strengthen programme design. This ideally leads not only to better to programme results, but also to better programme evaluation which can measure programme achievements, provide information on how and why good results were achieved, and offer lessons on programme improvement. Programme success can therefore be more easily demonstrated where programmes are “evaluation ready”.

It was with this idea in mind that an evaluability assessment of the UNICEF Peacebuilding, Education and Advocacy Programme (PBEA) was commissioned by the UNICEF Evaluation Office. The PBEA is a four-year (2012-2015) programme funded by the Government of the Netherlands, currently being implemented in 14 countries. The aim of the PBEA is to strengthen education policies and practices for peacebuilding. The evaluability assessment of the PBEA was not intended to assess programme results, even though it closely resembles a formative evaluation in some respects. Rather, it was intended to provide the evidence required to answer the following question: “To what extent does the PBEA have the technical and strategic elements in place to manage effectively towards results and to credibly demonstrate such results in future evaluations?”