Disrupting Extractive Practices: Reclaiming Evaluation through Indigenous, Made-in-Africa and Culturally Responsive Approaches by Eddah Kanini

Date: Wednesday, August 20, 2025

Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.

Hello all. I am Eddah Kanini, A Monitoring, Evaluation and Gender Consultant. Am happy to share my experience in engaging Indigenous pastoralist communities in Evaluation, which was not just a methodological exercise, but a transformative journey on it’s own.

Evaluations, especially impact evaluations, are heavily concentrated in Africa, with Sub Saharan Africa leading globally in the number of documented studies in the 3ie database with East Africa alone contributing to over 25% of the Sub-Saharan Africa’s total evaluations, making it a hub for Evaluations. Kenya, in East Africa, has numerous indigenous communities and diverse cultural practices.ConductingEvaluation in Indigenous communities demands more than technical expertise, but conducting Evaluation in Indigenous pastoralist community requires cultural sensitivity, and a radical shift from extractive practices to relational, inclusive and spiritual approaches. In my recent work, I applied a transformative evaluation framework grounded in the intersection of Indigenous Evaluation, Made-in-Africa Evaluation, and Culturally Responsive Evaluation (CRE) to meaningfully engage indigenous pastoralist communities and catalyse local change.

Hot Tips: What Made It Work?

• Centre Indigenous Knowledge Holders: Engaging community gatekeepers and cultural knowledge custodian from the start ensured legitimacy, trust, and groundedness in local                                                          realities. The buy-in helped in providing me with the location of the community, and the  wisdom from the knowledge keepers which reframed evaluation not as an external process, but as a reflective, community-driven process.
• Bridge the Power Asymmetries: Co-designing evaluation processes with local actors challenged the evaluator-respondent hierarchy and helped in cultivating a mutual responsibility.
• Forget about Translation and Embrace Cultural Interpretation: A lot of information is passed through unspoken norms, symbols, art and oral tradition practices. Understanding this proved more valuable than prioritizing the translation of questions. Storytelling here became a vital tool.

Cool Tricks: Approaches that Delivered

• Observing, Reflecting and Dialoguing: Allowing to be emersed into the community, listening to the stories and observing what is going on. In this case, ethnography enabled the collection of rich, nuanced data while respecting traditions during interaction.
• Flexibility is a Strength in Indigenous evaluation: It is important to adapt timelines and evaluation methods in response to pastoralist mobility, seasonal rituals such as circumcision, and cultural obligations. This allowed the evaluation to be inclusive and contextually appropriate.
• Use of Indigenous and Local Symbols: A lot of metaphors are rooted in livestock, Birds, rain, Wind, animal migration, or land.  This helped in translating evaluation concepts into familiar language that resonate with the communities.

 Rad Resources: What Informed the Approach

• The Africa Evaluation Principles: I was important to center the African values such as Ubuntu (South Africa)/Utu (East Africa) and communalism, and oral history.
• Cultural gatekeepers – A lot was emphasized on responsiveness to culture, context, and respect for traditional governance and power.

Lessons Learned: What I’ll Carry Forward

• Transformation is Relational: Technical rigor alone cannot produce transformative change but building trustful relationships is both a method and an outcome.
• A times Evaluation Can Be Healing: When communities feel recognized and respected, evaluation becomes a space to share the past harms of marginalization, invisibility and exclusion.
• An evaluator should exercise advocacy and activism: Evaluators should challenge epistemic injustice brought by dominant evaluation paradigms which often silence Indigenous voices and cultures. I learned that when we honor local voices, and adapt to complex realities, evaluation becomes a force for justice, dignity, and sustainability. Disrupting these paradigms means validating diverse ways of knowing and being.

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