September 15, 2022.
Three members of the Ukrainian Evaluation Association presented their experiences and lessons learned about evaluators’ work in Ukraine at the online event WeBiBar “What does it mean to be an evaluator during a full-scale war”. The event was initiated and organized by the United Kingdom Evaluation Society. Innovative format of WeBiBar assumed short presentations and free opinions exchange in a format like a casual conversation of friends in a bar over a glass of wine.
Informative talk attracted about 60 evaluators and MREL specialists from UK, UA, and other countries to learn about the context in which Ukrainian researchers and evaluators work. Presentations of Ukrainian evaluators generated exchanging insights about peculiarities in monitoring and evaluations within humanitarian aid programming and technical assistance over last 6 months.
Olha Krasovska, Dmytro Kondratenko and Iryna Nehrieieva shared their personal stories and experiences, as well as flagged specifics of evaluators work in Ukraine. Those concerned the conflict sensitivity and ethics, especially in working with vulnerable groups, difficulties in building representativeness of samples and reaching respondents, main risks in field work and travels through Ukraine to obtain reliable and objective data. Ideas of irrelevance of many logical frames and goals of current projects after the full-scale invasion in February 2022 were circulated. Overview of raising demand for monitoring and evaluation among international humanitarian and technical assistance was also discussed. Issues of poor coordination of humanitarian assistance and development by the government, barriers in access to services for people with disabilities as well as general trends in evaluation of state policy in Ukraine were flagged.
Other members of Ukrainian Evaluation Association imparted their stories that appended even more details to the realm in which Ukrainian evaluators do work now.
UK colleagues' feedback demonstrated a high interest to situation in Ukraine and willingness to know more. They encouraged UA presenters to share their expertise wider throughout international public events, professional gatherings and communities. According to UK Evaluation Association, that kind of knowledge is a unique one, and it can enrich international experts with better understanding of war context and evaluators’ role in analysis of the conflicts and their consequences.
This was a second international event during which the Ukrainian Evaluation Association could share a local experience in evaluations during armed conflict in 2022. Earlier, the UEA organized a special section “How to Evaluate War: Reality and Future of Ukrainian M&E" during the European Evaluation Society conference that was held in June 2022 in Copenhagen.