The concern to demonstrate ‘results’ or ‘impact’ has provided a broad sectoral incentive to invest more in ‘design, monitoring and evaluation’. This has led to a proliferation of manuals for programme staff and practitioners and a fair specialisation of ‘evaluation’, with courses, communities of practice, professional associations and even a few universities offering advanced degrees in ‘evaluation’.

Relevant and valuable as the investment in M&E is, we are missing however a critical element: stronger evaluative thinking among programme staff.