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November K&K: AI in Evaluation Case Studies from UN

Discover how Generative AI is revolutionizing evaluation practices through real-world applications at the UN. This webinar provides a practical approach to leveraging AI tools for analyzing data, uncovering insights, and scaling evaluations efficiently and effectively.

Participants will explore the following case studies from the UN:

- AI Interview Transcript Analysis: Learn how AI analyzed 50 interview transcripts for UNHCR, generating actionable insights through thematic and segment-specific analysis.

- AI Avatar Interviewer: See how AI avatars conducted 50 interviews in 2 days, enabling culturally sensitive, multilingual data collection with unprecedented speed and depth.

- AI Document Review: Understand how AI analyzed 700 management responses/ survey responses across 160 evaluation reports in 5 languages for UNICEF, identify key barriers and enablers

Attendees will gain practical skills to use AI for analyzing interview transcripts, survey responses, and reports, and even create AI avatar interviewers tailored to their needs.

James Goh

James is the Founder and CEO of AILYZE, an AI consultancy that provides cutting-edge solutions for evaluation teams, including an online AI tool on www.ailyze.com . He has led multiple AI and evaluation projects for development organizations such as Dalberg, ID Insight, and One Acre Fund. With a master’s degree in data, economics, and development policy from MIT, James specializes in leveraging AI to drive innovation in the development sector.

Posted in ANZEA News, Event news, Professional Development Events, ANZEA Event; Posted 4 days ago By Chanel Partridge Less than a minute to read

Using a realist lens to examine individualised funding for disabled New Zealanders

Samanthi Bandara will share insights into the methodological approach of her doctoral research, which applies realist evaluation to examine individualised funding in Aotearoa New Zealand. She will discuss how the use of realist qualitative interviews helps uncover hidden factors influencing complex social programmes, demonstrating how this approach enables exploration not only of whether funding works, but also how, why, for whom, and under what circumstances it produces outcomes.

Samanthi Bandara is a PhD candidate at the University of Canterbury. Before moving to New Zealand, she began her research career in health economics in her home country, Sri Lanka, and later shifted her focus to disability studies. Her key research interests include health and disability policy evaluation, with a particular emphasis in realist evaluation.

https://anzea.org.nz/event-manager/ViewEvent/66

Posted in Professional Development Events, Event news, ANZEA News, news; Posted 2 months ago By Chanel Partridge Less than a minute to read

Value for Money

Making difficult decisions about the allocation of limited resources is a persistent challenge for public services. During periods of fiscal constraint, the pressure to make wise choices intensifies. While there is strong demand for return-on-investment indicators - such as estimating the social value created for every dollar invested - these metrics provide only a partial view of value-for-money, especially in complex social settings.

The Value for Investment (VfI) approach addresses this challenge by integrating insights from both economics and evaluation. VfI uses evaluative reasoning, mixed methods, and stakeholder participation to deliver a more nuanced, robust assessment - one that reflects the complexity of real-world social investments.

We are pleased to invite you to join Julian King for an introductory workshop on the VfI approach. In this session, you will learn how to:

Pose and answer critical questions about good resource use to create social, cultural, environmental, and/or economic value.
Define value-for-money in the context of specific policies or programmes.
Select and justify a combination of methods from evaluation and economics.
Make robust evaluative judgements and communicate findings clearly to decision-makers.

This interactive workshop is not designed to make you an economist; other training opportunities exist for those seeking in-depth knowledge of methods such as social cost-benefit analysis or social return on investment. Instead, this session provides an overarching framework and practical skills to guide evaluation design, the savvy use of qualitative, quantitative, and economic methods, and the synthesis of mixed methods evidence to reach and report clear judgements.

While the workshop focuses on providing better answers to value-for-money questions, the rubrics-based skills you will acquire are transferable to any evaluation context.

This workshop is ideal for evaluators, policy analysts, government officials, NGO staff, development practitioners, and consultants (whether novice, intermediate, or advanced) seeking a practical, evidence-based approach that is used worldwide to assess value-for-money in complex policies and social investments.

Julian King is an Auckland-based public policy consultant. His professional background includes over 20 years evaluating policies and programmes in high, middle and low-income countries. Julian developed the Value for Investment approach through doctoral research. He received the 2021 Australian Evaluation Society (AES) Evaluation System Award in recognition of the contribution made through the VfI approach. Julian is a member of the Kinnect Group, an Associate of Oxford Policy Management, a member of Verian Group's Centre for Value for Money (VfM), an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne and a University Fellow at the Northern Institute. He is a member of ANZEA and the evaluation societies of Australia, UK, USA, and Europe. Julian specialises in evaluation and VfI capability development.