London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

We would like to invite you to the Centre for Evaluation’ symposium on “Timely Evaluation for Programme Improvement”

The success of health interventions and programmes largely depends on how well they are implemented. Most evaluations are done retrospectively, providing learning ‘for next time’, which is important but misses key opportunities to improve interventions and programmes as they are being delivered. Programmes are increasingly designed to include concurrent evaluations of early outcomes, with recruitment of evaluation teams at programme inception and using new technologies, to deliver data that can be used in real-time to improve programme implementation. Therefore, there is a need to adapt and develop new methods for using this timely evaluation data to improve programmes, and evaluating whether its use is successful in improving the impact of programmes.

Please join us for a full day of interesting presentations by speakers from various disciplines and sectors, as well as engaging discussions through which we can learn from each other.

Speakers will include James Copestake from University of Bath, Val Curtis and Liz Allen from LSHTM, Martin Dale from PSI and Claire Hutchings from Oxfam. We will hear reflections on the day from Mary da Silva (Wellcome Trust) and colleagues from DfID. There will be plenty of time for interesting conversations and networking.

The symposium will be organised in three sessions throughout the day, each addressing a different aspect. The first session will be on how to conduct timely evaluation for programme improvement. In this session, case studies from different disciplines will be presented, and the audience will break into groups to discuss the topic. The second session will focus on evaluating both the process and the impact of using timely evaluation, with presentations followed by a discussion. In the third session, we will hear reflections from governmental and non-governmental organisations and funders on how and by whom should decisions should be made as the information from timely evaluation becomes available. Finally, a keynote speaker will end the day.