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Poster Reception #2

Graduate Students and New Evaluators

Session: Poster Reception #2

218 - Creating a Competent Extension Evaluation Pipeline by Strengthening Graduate Education: Experiences from South Asia and East Africa

Stream: Professional Development and Leadership

Thursday, October 24, 2024
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM PST
Abstract Information: Creating competent extension evaluators is a common demand globally as the extension systems transition into impact-driven organization. Creating competent evaluation professionals is a goal of the graduate-level extension education program. As researchers with roots in Asia and Africa, we analyze the evaluation graduate curricula of India, Nepal, Uganda, and Kenya. and discuss implications to strengthen the curricula in a way it develops a competent evaluator pipeline. In India, the curriculum of graduate-level extension courses is administered by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, an autonomous agency under the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers’ Welfare. There are three closely related courses in “evaluation” in Agriculture, Veterinary and Fishery sciences and that is “Evaluation and Impact Assessment”. The main goal of this course is to orient students on the importance of evaluation and impact assessment alongside developing requisite capacities to undertake those independently. There are five major components in this course along with some specific units under each: Program evaluation (Introduction to evaluation, evaluation theories), Evaluation process (conducting evaluation, metaevaluations), Program management techniques (SWOT analysis, Gantt charts, networks), Evaluation frameworks (Bennett’s Hierarchy, Logic Framework), Impact assessment (Introduction, Indicators and Approaches to Impact Assessment, Environment Impact Assessment). Two doctoral-level courses exist viz. “Monitoring and Evaluation of Livestock Development Programs” and “Impact Assessment of Development Programs”. In the context of Nepal, there is a significant shortage of graduate level courses that focus on evaluation while few available courses vary in content and depth across different agricultural universities. One of the major reasons for this is the poor linkage of extension, teaching, and research. The Extension system in the country, a major employer of the agricultural graduates and mainly public-driven, lacks emphasis in impact evaluation. Thus, it indirectly affects universities' decisions on offering evaluation courses resulting in insufficient skills in extension agents, lack of expertise in extension faculty members and vice versa. In Uganda, there is a growing need for evaluation professionals in the current context of extension, but the insufficiency of the existing graduate-level agricultural colleges is significantly hindering the promotion of robust evaluation-based graduate level courses with a few exceptions e.g. Makerere University which offers extension evaluation units in a graduate level agricultural science program in Uganda. The coverage of this course unit is almost similar to that described in the Indian context. The scenario of the graduate level extension curriculum in Kenya is quite parallel with the Ugandan context as there is no significant space available for evaluation. The graduate level extension courses are underdeveloped in Kenya with a limited focus on “evaluation” as independent courses. In this context, there are multiple opportunities available in South Asia and East Africa to develop and incorporate robust evaluation-focused extension curricula. By presenting the status of the evaluation-based courses in these selected countries, we hope to generate a discussion on how these curricula compare with the evaluation curricula in the graduate level extension education programs in the U.S., and how the curricula in Asia and Africa can be strengthened by collaborating with the U.S. universities.