Our Centre recently completed an evaluation exercise that provided us with the opportunity to reflect on our founding vision and mission while measuring our progress and impact. This evaluation also helped us to critically identify wins and losses of our journey so far and pathways that we used to learn and improve our interventions. As a result, we have developed a revised theory of change, a monitoring and evaluation framework as well as delivery indicators.
Using the period starting in 2016 to March 2022, the evaluation process unearthed key findings and recommendations that may improve our relevance, coherence, effectiveness, and efficiency in the sector.
The following are outcomes that our team will be working to implement in the coming months:
- Implement strategies to generate additional revenue and attract more funders to nurture long-term strategic partnerships.
- Invest in more staff to teach and supervise Masters and PhD students, thereby ensuring that the content of courses and the topics of postgraduate students are aligned with the Centre’s goals and objectives.
- Forge new networks across the whole of Africa offering scholarships to individuals from underprivileged communities academic programmes and short courses.
- Further integrate philanthropy into the programmes of Wits Business School, thereby influencing the leaders of business who attend the school’s courses.
- Develop a post-training feedback system that tracks individuals who graduate from various courses, to ascertain the impact of the skills and knowledge they have gained on philanthropy in Africa.
‘For the first time since our birth, we can now refer to an official evaluation of our work and cite some exciting successes and lessons that are backed by data. All along, we have been depending on ad-hoc information. This evaluation does not surprise us, but it gave us hard evidence that we are moving in the right direction, but the journey is not as easy as we would like it to be. For example, how do we make the Centre truly African including through the lens of its funding? How do we also embed our courses not just as standalone but as integral in the other offerings by the school? These are the challenges that the evaluation has thrown back at us. We will be working hard to address these, and many other issues raised by the evaluation’, emphasised Bhekinkosi Moyo, Director of CAPSI.
