Aleph Notes #5: Post-Pandemic Fieldwork

Research and evaluations continued during the COVID-19 pandemic but travel to programme locations (rightfully) ground to a halt. Aleph’s team did its best to document the strengths and weaknesses of programme performance but let’s be honest: ‘armchair’ evaluations do not cut it. Evaluators lose perspective if they cannot be in-country and end-beneficiary voices are usually the first key informant group to be axed as marginalized group interviews are near impossible to organize from afar. At best connections are bad and interview details are lost, at worst those that should be at the centre of the impact story cannot be contacted at all.

Some organisations in the post-pandemic world have been slow to issue tenders that allow space / budget for travel. For those that have, we have noticed an up-tick in the quality of product we can provide. Human stories bring life to a report where numbers and secondary sources simply cannot. This is particularly important in fragile and conflict-affected contexts where donors rarely travel and therefore have little visibility on the impact of the funds provided. At Aleph, we champion stories of change and lessons learned case studies as an integral part of our work. These cannot be delivered with quality from our desks. We call on evaluation funders to require in-person interviews with community members so that their voices can be heard, and quality evaluations can be delivered.