Who We Are

The African Evaluation Association (AfrEA) is a non-profit umbrella for African Voluntary Organizations 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..

KEY DATES FOR SUBMITTING

AN ABSTRACT

15 DECEMBER 2023

Submission deadline

15 JANUARY 2024

Notification of acceptance of abstracts

15 FEBUARY 2024

The deadline for receipt of full papers

AfrEA: Developing Evaluation Capacity to advance Africa.

Empowering African Evaluators, Empowering Africa

The African Evaluation Association (AfrEA) was founded in 1999, in response to Africa’s growing appeal for advocacy, information sharing and advanced capacity building in evaluation. The organisation’s chief focus was to counter limited evaluation opportunities by building strategic bridges for African evaluators to connect, network and share experiences.

Our Voluntary Organizations for Professional Development (VOPEs) in Africa

“The most enjoyable was the start of the AfrEA, or really the ‘parent association’ the Nairobi M&E Network. This was a group of people working in evaluation who I invited to come to a monthly meeting to share their work and discuss their study proposals and drafts, or just hold brainstorming sessions. It was a very open forum. Participants were encouraged to invite and bring their friends. As I was travelling a lot in Eastern and Southern Africa, and found it boring sitting in my hotel room in the evenings, I started asking the UNICEF M&E Officers to invite a similar group of people to meet while I was visiting their countries. We generally found a lot to talk about and that meeting was effectively the first meeting of most of the first half a dozen national M&E groups in Africa.
These groups naturally wanted to meet each other, so in 1999 my office in UNICEF organized the first meeting of AfrEA as an umbrella body in support of these national groups. Over 300 participants from 35 countries attended the inaugural conference and 88 papers were presented in 7 parallel topical strands.
Being part of the birth of the AfrEA was one of the most satisfying components of my working life.

Dr Mahesh Patel

AfrEA founder

Download the early day history from Dr. Mahesh Patel