Indigenous Made in Africa Evaluation Frameworks: Addressing Epistemic Violence and Contributing to Social Transformation

Abstract

Transformative change is needed if the world is to achieve the sustainable development goals. Such change requires attention to culture, ethics, and values. We discuss the need to be responsive to the voices of Indigenous scholars in terms of the assumptions that guide methodological choices in the evaluation of international initiatives. We describe an Indigenous paradigmatic framework and then narrow the focus to a Made in Africa approach to evaluation that is designed to redress the epistemic violence perpetrated by the use of a Western cultural lens to determine evaluation approaches.