“Really a Sharing and Learning Event in Thessaloniki, Greece!”

By Asham Baysa (Ethiopia)

I attended EES 2018 conference for the first time and it was the most amazing experience for me to share and learn from evaluations within Europe and across other continents. Resilience is a central concept of this conference. The workshop was very demanding, but very informative and helped me to come up with practical knowledge.

I interacted with different evaluators, researchers, donors, and other professionals from different organizations and countries. I was able to meet M&E experts and talk to them in person, , benefitting from their experience.

One of my favourite highlights was the outcome harvesting (OH). I would like to express my sincere thanks for the facilitators’ hard work in describing the OH steps, outcome challenges, etc. They shared their knowledge and best practices, helping me gain knowledge of OH, allowing IRC Ethiopia GBV programming to better understand the outcome of its projects, and identify means of improving the overall projects/programmes.

After the EES 2018 conference, I discussed with the IRC Ethiopia  GBV programming technical team ways to implement outcome harvesting in one of our recent projects, which is the adolescent girls programme in Sudanese refugee camps and in the local communities of Ethiopia. Thus, I will implement and share what I have gained from the workshop and will communicate the facilitators if I have any inquires and challenges while implementing.