Awarded two long-term agreements (LTAs) for evaluation services with the World Food Programme (WFP), North South Consultants Exchange (NSCE) joined the respective LTA 2023 Workshops in Rome. From June 12 to 13, the focus was on the LTA of Centralized Evaluations including Country Strategic Plan Evaluations (CSPE), Corporate Emergency Evaluations (CEE), and Other Evaluation Services. The LTA Workshop for Decentralized Evaluations was in turn conducted on October 2-3.
Project: Joint Evaluation of the Rome-based Agencies’ Resilience Initiative “Strengthening the resilience of livelihoods in protracted crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger, and Somalia” from 2017 to 2023With quality assurance being a central workshop topic for both LTAs, our team identified as the main learning outcome the importance of setting in place a quality assurance system (QAS) from the get-go. How to kick off the quality assurance of an evaluation? The answer is to particularly invest time into raising awareness on the quality assurance system during the mobilisation phase.
Dr. Zohra Merabet, Executive Director of NSCE, shared in-house her main takeaway for the WFP two-days workshop:
As per the recommendations, the quality assurance system of the evaluation should be introduced to the evaluation team at the launch of the evaluation to ensure that WFP standards are embedded in the process. Likewise, the staff members of the firm, in charge of the coordination, research, and backstopping should also be fully knowledgeable of the evaluation quality assurance system.
To suit the action to the word, NSCE conducted an Information Session for its Evaluation Teams on the quality assurance system of WFP. NSCE made it its good practice to embed this awareness and training material within internal kick-off meetings for evaluation assignments.
Thus, NSCE further aimed to harvest the seeds of the LTA workshops and its desired result to provide an opportunity to exchange and learn from each other regarding quality assurance techniques/approaches.
