[SAMEA UPDATE] #2

Dear SAMEA members and potential SAMEA members

A number of developments occurred in SAMEA since our last update. It is necessary to summarise here the two most important of these for your attention, namely the 2009 SAMEA Conference and the election of the new SAMEA Board of Directors. 

2009 SAMEA Conference: 17 – 22 August 2009

We recently successfully concluded our second biennial SAMEA Conference at the Emperor’s Palace in Gauteng on the theme of eVALUation. While we are still processing the formal evaluations of the conference, all indications are that it was again a huge success. It was attended by 266 delegates from across the world. The presentations will soon be available on the SAMEA website. A notice will be issued on SAMEATalk when they are available.

A total of 13 pre-conference capacity-building workshops were also organised over a period of three days on diverse topics of practical interest to M&E specialists. A total of 264 participants attended those workshops.

Without detracting in any way from the excellent contributions that we have seen from other presenters at the conference, the following international and local contributions must be singled out:

• The keynote address at the conference was delivered by Prof Jennifer Greene, eminent international M&E scholar on qualitative and mixed methods in M&E, and President-elect of the American Evaluation association (AEA). She also presented capacity-building workshops on these topics which were well-attended.
• Florence Etta, the newly elected Chairperson of the African Evaluation Association, who delivered the closing address.
• Dr. Ralph Mgijima,  Chairperson of the Public Service Commission, delivered a keynote address. In his address he indicated that it was impressive that both SAMEA and the African Evaluation Association (AFrEA) have evolved in a relatively short period of time to produce a vibrant community of practice, at country and continental levels respectively.
• Prof Johann Mouton, Director of the Centre for Research in Science and Technology for his stimulating closing plenary session address on impact evaluations.
• Dr Howard White, Executive Director of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (see www.3ieimpact.org), presented a capacity-building workshop on Theory-based Impact Evaluation where cutting edge international approaches and methodologies for impact evaluations were discussed in detail. As in other workshops, participants had the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of the issues concerned and for practical application of the concepts involved.
• Prof Jim Rugh, renowned international M&E specialist and consultant, also participated actively in the conference, and also presented two interactive workshops on how to conduct M&E under real world conditions (see www.RealWorldEvaluation.org). He further assessed the conference in a note to the American Evaluation Association as follows:

By Jim Rugh, AEA Representative to the IOCE 

SAMEA (the South African Monitoring and Evaluation Association) held its second biannual conference in Johannesburg August 17-21.  My observations:

1. There is an amazing growth of the evaluation profession in South Africa.  The workshops, plenary keynotes and panel presentations, multiple conference sessions and active discussions in the hallways and during meals among the over 300 participants provided ample evidence of a highly professional organization.
2. There is a remarkable relationship between the Government of South Africa and the evaluation profession.  From the President on down the government is taking transparency seriously, and recognizes the vital role evaluation should play.  The Public Service Commission, an independent watchdog agency, has been a strong supporter of and collaborator with SAMEA.
3. Among the 73 national evaluation networks/associations/societies around the world identified by the IOCE, SAMEA is surely one of the strongest.  It serves as a good model to others.  (Note: including regional and international evaluation groups the current total count is 86.)
4. SAMEA is sharing its energy and resources with other groups throughout Africa through AfrEA, the regional African Evaluation Association.  A specific example: SAMEA is launching a professional evaluation journal which will include writers from all of Africa and will be shared with an all-African audience (and beyond).

Those of us in AEA want to promote the development of the evaluation profession around the world.  Therefore we should be proud of the development of our sister organization, SAMEA, and our professional colleagues based in South Africa.  As I thought about writing this piece for the AEA e-newsletter I was going to say that there were two representatives of AEA at the SAMEA conference:  Jennifer Green, AEA’s President-elect-elect, who made a very appropriate keynote address on values in evaluation, the theme of this SAMEA conference; and myself (there to present two pre-conference workshops).   However, recalling the analysis Susan Kistler conducted last year of AEA’s membership database, I was reminded that AEA members live in 87 countries, including 18 based in South Africa.  In other words, AEA was well represented at the SAMEA conference, not just by outside visitors, but by members of our own ‘family’ who are active members and leaders of this dynamic professional community.

A number of interesting panel discussions provided opportunities for robust engagement amongst the delegates on issues ranging from the value of M&E in performance improvement in government service delivery, to strengthening evaluations in Corporate Social Investment programmes.

As this very succinct above summary of the highlights of the 2009 conference indicates, we seem to have brought together a very interesting group of M&E specialists that interacted well with their respected audiences. They provided much food for thought about how to improve not only M & E values, but also M&E systems, procedures, practices, outputs and outcomes. These results would not have been possible without the active sponsorships to the conference of our main partner in M&E, the Public Service Commission, as well as other significant contributions from PALAMA, GTZ, SAS and the Zenex Foundation. We laud their strategic insights to support our conference so concretely, and look forward to cementing even tighter our past working relationships in the promotion of M&E in this country as well as in Africa and globally.

New Board

Five new members were also elected to the Board of Directors of SAMEA, just before the end of the conference. The new Board now consists of the following individuals who will be responsible for the portfolios next to their names:

The contact details for the new Board will soon appear on the SAMEA website. We welcome our five new directors to the Board. They come from diverse backgrounds and bring with them different specialist bodies of knowledge and experience in different M&E sectors that would be very useful to the board.  Please feel free to contact directly the Board member(s) responsible for any issues(s) that you might want to discuss with us.

As new Chair of SAMEA I would also like to express my sincere gratitude personally and on behalf of the new board to the outgoing board members Dr Mark Abrahams, Mr Indran Naidoo, Ms Benita Williams, Dr Kevin Kelly and Dr Marlene Roefs for their dedicated contributions to SAMEA during their 3 years in office. They spent inordinate volumes of time on SAMEA activities within and outside office hours, to ensure that the interests of SAMEA and its members are promoted in the best possible way. The new board is going to miss their commitment, knowledge and skills sorely during the remainder of our respective terms of office.

More strategic developments in and around SAMEA will be addressed in future updates which we envisage will appear more regularly in future. These updates will focus inter alia on the various strategic programmes that the Board has prioritised, M&E-relevant developments in our environment, and new M&E-related resources that might assist our members to upgrade the quality of their M&E activities.

Fanie Cloete
Chair: SAMEA