EDUCATIONAL DILEMMAS UNCOVERED

I have spent over 15 years in the field of teaching, teacher training and school management. I have been interested in observing and understanding how do educational initiatives make a difference in people's lives. When I decided to do my PhD research, it was clear for me That will study issues related to the impact of education on people's lives, well-being and status. This opened my eyes to the concept of “Empowerment”.  Empowerment, a buzzword that has been used and sometimes overused, especially in the field of international development. But to clear my mind from all the tens of definitio, I decided to stick to the World Bank definition: “the capacity of individuals or groups to make purposeful and effective choices in the interest of pursuing a better life for themselves” (Walton, 2003, p.3). Empowerment is a complex term with endless interpretations, due to its multi-contextual (political, socio-cultural, economic…) and multi-dimensional (individual, community,...

Over the past decades a paradigm shift took place, from a top-down conventional to a bottom-up participatory development agenda, envisioning empowerment as an outcome of participation, due to its respect for local knowledge and ability to facilitate local ownership (Chamber, 1994). New top-down participatory approaches, commonly referred to as ‘participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) emerged. PM &E approaches differ from the conventional approaches, in that they seek to actively engage project stakeholders, while assessing the project’s progress and results (The World Bank, n.d.) . According to Rietbergen-McCracken & Narayan (1998) , there are four main principles all kind of PM&E approaches follow: Local people are active participants, not just sources of information Stakeholders evaluate, outsiders facilitate Focus on building stakeholder capacity for analysis and problem-solving Process builds commitment to implementing any recommended cor...

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is considered one of the greatest contributors to the development of evaluation policies and guidelines in the field of international development initiatives. According to the OECD, evaluation is a systemic and objective assessment, of an ongoing or completed project, programme or policy, its design, implementation and results. The goal of this undertaking is to “determine the relevance and fulfilment of objectives, developmental efficiency, effectiveness, impact and sustainability. An evaluation should provide information that is credible and useful, enabling the incorporation of lessons learned into the decision-making process of both recipients and donors” (OECD, 1991,p.5). Evaluating what happened during and after the delivery of a development programme aims to observe if empowerment has been achieved. This involves tracking changes in relationships. However, due to the dynamic, complex and contextual nat...