Evaluation as transformative practice
Monitoring, Evaluation and Accountability through Transformative Learning
Conventional evaluation has become a burden rather than a tool for change. People spend hours participating in surveys or interviews, and organisations then analyse information and write reports that then shit on shelves, measuring what happened rather than what changed and serving funders rather than the people the work is meant to serve.
realife asks, instead, through a collective learning process, what changed, how, for whom, and how it can be built on.
The accountability that matters is to those with a stake in the outcomes, not only to the funders commissioning the work.
Alongside, not in judgement
We are an ally in the work succeeding for the people it serves, helping organisations learn their way forward rather than scoring them.
Evaluation that drives action
What surfaces feeds decisions as the work happens, rather than waiting for a final report nobody reads.
Accountable to those with a stake
The people the work is meant to serve are partners in judging it, not just its funders.
Honest about contribution
We help organisations see their real part in wider change rather than claim sole credit, surfacing the contributions of communities, organisations and funders so all are valued.
Built with, not extracted from
Communities, staff and funders are recognised for what they each bring. The people closest to the work help shape the evaluation, not just supply its data.
One of our frameworks: Source-to-Sea
Source-to-Sea sees a programme as a river catchment: individual projects are tributary streams feeding a larger river, which flows out to sea, to society and the wider system change is sought in. Not every stream reaches the sea, and that is not failure. Along the way it waters the land it passes through, and that matters in its own right.
The framework follows a project's course to ask not whether it worked, but how and why change happened, what shaped it, and what it contributed. It is not a template applied from outside; it takes shape through how an organisation and its stakeholders use it together.
Where this is happening
We are a long-term partner of the Institute for Economic Justice, using the a Source-to-Sea framework that supports their strategy and shifts evaluation away from donor accountability toward their own political and ethical commitments.
Among our current partners we are working with Amnesty International on an eighteen-month engagement, co-designing and accompanying the piloting of a framework that helps decentralise power within an international movement organisation, built as a tool activists and staff can hold rather than a system imposed from above.
Earlier engagements, including with groundWork, the Centre for Environmental Rights, Equal Education, Oxfam GB, Oxfam US, Social Learning and Innovation Ltd, Legal Resource Centre, Emerald Network, British Red Cross, Plastic Solutions Fund, WWF Tanzania and WWF-SA, developed our approach into the form it now takes. We thank all the partners and learners who shape our ongoing thinking and practice.
Evaluation posts
