Client: African Evaluation Association (AfrEA)
When: 2017

The African Evaluation Association (AfrEA) is a non-profit umbrella organisation for African Voluntary Organisations for Professional Development (VOPEs). It serves as a leading source of evaluation knowledge for individual evaluators in countries where national evaluation associations do not exist. In the past 3 years ALINE has been privileged to support the African Evaluation Association to build its capacity, institutional effectiveness and governance systems. With its Secretariat in Accra, Ghana, AfrEA was founded in 1999 in response to a growing demand for information sharing, advocacy, and advanced evaluation capacity building in Africa.

Despite the existence of a few national evaluation networks in Africa, evaluation capacity-building efforts have mainly been driven by international development organisations. AfrEA promotes the development of Africa-rooted, Africa-led M&E.

Support through ALINE enabled AfrEA to adopt its first bilingual constitution in 2017, build a strong and accountable board, develop a strategic plan and recruited the head of its Secretariat. AfrEA was also supported to resource and execute a very successful conference in Uganda in 2017 where it launched a major initiative facilitating the development of a South-South agenda for evaluation methods, tools and philosophies to complement those already being pursued across Africa. Of the 687 participants, half represented Africans. Of the 71 countries represented, 36 were African.

AfrEA continues to go from strength to strength as a leading African thought leader and catalyst for National Evaluation Associations and organisations across the continent and the development of evaluation capacity that is contextually relevant and highly valuable and complemented by philosophies and values from the south.