ABSTRACT
The Evaluation Department had tended to deliver and disseminate the product, identify the lessons, and then try to promulgate the lessons. Poverty reduction is an enormous topic, and Evaluation Department staff believed that everyone from top management down to the country program staff should understand what the evaluation was trying to achieve. The aim of Department for International Development (DFID) was to explicitly focus on poverty reduction. Poor people themselves thought about their situation differently in different places, and somehow DFID needed to take these perceptions into account in evaluating poverty reduction programs. In the 1994 Zambia poverty assessment, for example, the vulnerability of widows was shown to be a strong dimension of poverty, so the evaluators would have expected to see that factor reflected in the development programs in Zambia. Another conferee asked whether DFID planned to link learning from evaluations to salary incentives.
