ABSTRACT
It has often been argued that evaluation is useless, and at times worse than useless. Evaluation criteria that seem relevant at the outset may well prove more hindrance than help to a project that is breaking new ground and exploring ways of communicating on sensitive matters. By working closely alongside the various activities of a community youth education project on HIV, we have been able to find ways of tailoring our approach to their circumstance and needs. At the same time, in the course of evaluating an innovative and developing project, we have been obliged to reassess evaluation approaches. In consequence, our experience has highlighted several dilemmas and contradictions, and moreover we think we have gone some way towards devising an approach that combines the demands of objectivity and accountability with the need for a sensitive and adaptable response. In this chapter, we describe the project and the evaluation approach we adopted, and the discoveries we made in the course of our attempts to apply the latter.
