MEA Member, Oyuna Jukov shared with us her experience at the American Evaluation Association Anual Conference.

Networking

This was my 3rd attendance in AEA annual conference. This time it was held in Portland, Oregon with slogan “Amplifying and empowering voices”, It was a 4 day of learning and networking. My attendance is not only for me as an individual, but rather a representation of MEA in terms of networking with the evaluation world. With over 37 years of experience, AEA has been and will always be our important source of knowledge, support  and resource for MEA’s development to accomplish our vision of institutionalization of evaluation in Mongolia.  With our only 3 years of existence, MEA has been benefiting from tremendous support from AEA, its past Presidents, Washington Evaluators, American University and many individual legends of Evaluation and I personally was honored to continue and even expand this important networking for MEA at this year’s conference.  I’m so proud of Ms.Tseveengerel Amgalan, former government officer in Evaluation, currently pursuing her MSc in data science at Bentley University, MEA member, participated  in the conference with her poster presentation titled “Challenges and strategies in implementing Results-Based Management in Mongolia” who was awarded with International Travel Grant from AEA. I wish good luck with her continued research on this topic and looking forward to reading the final work soon. 

Learning

Amplifying and Empowering Voices in Evaluation

As the title of the conference was “Amplifying and Empowering Voices in Evaluation”, I could say, all the presentations talked about how to ensure everyone’s voice is included in evaluation. Voices from Amazon, youth, indigenous were heard with various presentations. Out of hundreds of presentations, I would like to highlight “Localization analysis framework” by Global Affairs Canada’s evaluation division (GAC).This framework was developed as an evaluation assessment tool to measure a program’s alignment with a locally led development approach and to identify key relevant barriers and enablers. It offers 9 dimensions to measure the degree of local ownership and leadership. Please see the framework: https://www.betterevaluation.org/tools-resources/localization-analysis-framework 

Driving and hindering forces of the institutionalization of evaluation in a global perspective

Dr.Reinhard Stockmann, from Center of Evaluation, Saarland University presented about the research project of analyzing the institutionalization of evaluation in the political, social and profesisonal system in all countries worldwide where evaluation is. With MEA’s vision, this topic is important and I’m happy to announce that he will be talking about this research at APEA’s “National Evaluation Policies and Systems” online on Nov 5th at 2.30pm IST time. The link to registration : http://bit.ly/NEPSwebinar3. Tseveengerel Amgalan will be moderating this webinar. Please join. 

GenAI for Social and Behavior Change (SBC) programming: 

MERL Tech Initiative  facilitated a think tank session on how AI tools such as GenIA, NLP, and LLMs has the potentional to transform how organizations encourage SBC in critical areas such as sexual and reproductive health, vaccine uptake and sharing of mis- and disimformation. Emerging Ai is being used in efforts to improve M&E of SBC programming. Different kinds of AI can be integrated into qualitative data analysisto enable greateer speed and efficiency and to augment the amount of data that can be coded, analyzed, and simmarized to aid with evaluation. Most importantly, there are critical knowledge gaps such as ethical, quality and there is a need to identify and scale them for quality. I am happy the MERL is willing to present at one of our Learning session in the near future. 

Hackathon at AEA by MERL

Is AI increasing the digital divide or helping to decrease it?  The No-Code AI Hackathon presented by AEA and MTI kicked off in Portland last week during AEA’s annual conference and generated incredible enthusiasm and creativity, showcasing how AI can potentially enable evaluation practice. The AEA allocated physical space and AV resources in a central location of the Oregon Convention Center to ensure high visibility for the Hackathon. Participants received one-on-one support and joined in demos showcasing how to make chatbots with user-friendly platforms like Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s GPTs, and Hugging Face Assistants. Here's a link to the blog post to learn more!

https://merltech.org/hackathon-highlights-and-submission-due-date-update

Story slam!

Participants were given 5 minutes to share a story about a time new evidence changed their mind or changed their life. There were many interesting stories from how a personal perception changed, to how their mind professionaly changed towards evaluation and led to successful career.  I’m so happy to share that amazing facilitator Anne-Louse Sterry is willing to conduct a session with MEA in Learning Session!

Oyuna Jukov, MEA Member