Telecenter Evaluation: A Global Perspective

This is report on the results of an international meeting on telecentre evaluation organised by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in September of 1999 for a network of telecentre practitioners and researchers. It focuses on the increasing access to telecentres, the resulting wealth of experiences and lessons, and the need for assessment and evaluation tools. The paper reports on efforts to establish common language and understanding of the key issues surrounding telecentre evaluation, as well as develop some practical evaluation tools.

The preliminary section reports on the meeting's identification of guiding principles and key issues, and on its findings on global research and evaluation. The second section publishes papers on 23 telecentre projects worldwide.

Within this context, the preliminary chapters identify needs to understand emerging evaluation frameworks and methodologies, to access information on needs and resources available for telecentre monitoring and impact assessment, and to name salient issues.

According to the authors, the meeting resulted in a common language for evaluation, an understanding of key issues, and some practical tools. These results are based on the following communication strategies from the summary section of the report:

• People-focused, participatory evaluation design that is sensitive to gender and local context;
• Evaluating both successes and failures for quality and sustainability;
• Disaggregating evaluations for use in training workshops;
• Clarifying the purpose and use of an evaluation and its results in a stakeholder agreement;
• Finding adaptable and replicable methods;
• Ensuring transparency;
• Designing effective means for communications of results; and
• Building the evaluation process into each project design from the start.