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The evaluation of capacity building activities is important for determining the effectiveness and impact of such activities on the target groups of stakeholders - participants, organizers and institutions. Evaluation seeks to establish two fundamental facts as a basis for improving the design of similar future programs: (i) the degree of learning in terms of cognition and skills and (ii) the level of knowledge transferred in terms of the usage of acquired skills and organizational results.
Training goals in the context of Electronic Government range from general awareness building (government leaders), through the acquisition of specific managerial or technical skills (public managers), to developing specific programs or new organizational capabilities for new services (for agencies as a whole). Establishing concrete evidence of the effectiveness of training requires a rigorous evaluation framework. This project develops an evaluation framework for e-Government training and capacity building, and applying this framework to evaluate the training carried out by the EU-China Information Society project.
Major project objectives include:
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developing a monitoring and evaluation framework for the training program,
developing instruments to gather data for determining the scope, achievements, challenges and impact of the training program in different provinces and municipalities in China,
- articulating lessons learnt and recommending how a sustainable e-government training program could be developed for the provinces on the completion of the EU-China Information Society Project,
- developing an evaluation report on the findings suitable for different categories of stakeholders, in particular policy makers in the area of capacity building for electronic government and informatization in China,
- disseminating the evaluation framework to other governments in developing countries for better design of programs and improved assessment of the results obtained from capacity building initiatives
Five major activities will be carried out by the project to fulfill these objectives:
- Research - survey of existing Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Frameworks for training and capacity building programs and developing a suitable evaluation model,
- Methodology – specification of the assessment process (based on the model) including the development, validation and refinement of instruments,
- Data Collection – application of the instruments (questionnaires, interviews, observations, etc.) in order to collect required data to compute measures,
- Data Analysis – computing assessment measures, particularly the measures of processes and outcomes related to pre-training, in-training and post-training phases,
- Recommendations – providing concrete recommendations on how the design and implementation of future training programs can be improved for effectiveness and sustainability based on the results of evaluation, and
- Dissemination - documenting the results of the evaluation exercise as a report and packaging project deliverables into courseware and toolkits.
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