Advocating for Evaluation: A Toolkit to Develop Advocacy Strategies to Strengthen an Enabling Environment for Evaluation

"We need to shape a compelling message on the importance of evaluation for policy-makers, civil society and the public."
This toolkit contains guidance and tools on how to plan, design, and implement advocacy strategies to increase demand for national evaluation policies and systems in order to ensure more accountable, equitable, and gender-responsive development policies and planning. As stated in the toolkit, "Evaluations are a means to support good governance: accountability from governments to their citizens and their development partners, transparency in the use of resources and their results, and in learning from experience." They capture lessons learned from experience that can be used to improve development policies and programmes and make them more efficient, effective, and equitable.
As the guide explains, "while technical evaluation capacities (the so-called supply side) are paramount to produce high-quality evaluative evidence, an enabling environment for evaluation is necessary to ensure it is actually used for decision-making. In many instances, the demand and use of evaluation to inform policy-making is not as strong as it should be, because potential evaluation clients (e.g. policy makers and the public) do not understand how evaluation can improve policy-making. In these cases, an advocacy strategy to strengthen an enabling environment for evaluation is necessary."
"The toolkit will be useful for civil society organisations (CSOs), Voluntary Organizations for Professional Evaluation (VOPEs) as well as governments, parliaments, academia, evaluation units from development cooperation agencies and other development partners who want to advocate to increase demand for evaluation in order to build an enabling environment for evaluation. It will equally be useful for other stakeholders, such as students, journalists and managers who want to expand their understanding of a structured approach to sustained and effective advocacy to promote a culture of evaluation."
It is designed to help users to:

• "Learn how strategic advocacy can be leveraged to increase the demand for evaluation.
• Acquire essential skills to become an effective advocate for building an enabling environment for evaluation.
• Devise a long-term advocacy strategy to develop and implement equity and gender sensitive national evaluation policies and systems.
• Respond quickly to seize any unplanned advocacy opportunity to build a culture of evaluation."

The toolkit is broken down into the following sections:
Section 1: Introduction - this section reinforces advocacy as being central to building an enabling environment for evaluation
Section 2: Developing an advocacy strategy to build an enabling environment for evaluation - provides a framework for developing a strategic evaluation advocacy strategy
Section 3: Tracking progress in advocating for an enabling environment for evaluation
Section 4: Advocating for equity-focused and gender-responsive evaluation policies
Section 5: Strengthening partnerships to influence evaluation policies and systems
Section 6: Working with parliamentarians to increase demand for evaluation
Section 7: Managing knowledge in advocacy
Section 8: Managing risks in advocacy
Section 9: Mobilizing resources for advocacy
The toolkit was developed by the International Organization for Cooperation in Evaluation (IOCE), UNWomen, and International Evaluation Partnership Initiative (EvalPartners), together with many other partners.