Learning & Evaluation

Get involved!

Contact AfP’s Senior Director for Learning & Evaluation, Jessica Baumgardner-Zuzik at jessica@allianceforpeacebuilding.org.

The Alliance for Peacebuilding is so incredibly pleased to share with you the first iteration of the newly released Eirene Peacebuilding Database^TM.

The Eirene Peacebuilding Database^TM is a comprehensive collection of 3,381 indicators from 2,008 publicly available peacebuilding resources that will assist in enhancing assessments and measuring impact across seven program areas. Click on the link above to explore these 7 areas!

Through its cutting-edge Learning & Evaluation (L&E) program, AfP is leading the peacebuilding field to embrace a more adaptive and rigorous evaluative culture to prove impact and understand what works. This requires building capacity to capture high quality, actionable data; encouraging the field to become more evidence-based; and making a stronger case for peace through shared research efforts to synthesize impact. As a result, peacebuilders will be more effective collectively, focusing our limited resources on sustainable solutions to complex problems.

The L&E Department at AfP is focused on 3 main areas to improve our members and serve as a public good to the entire peacebuilding field:

1. Improving internal capacity for peacebuilding organizations to effectively design, monitor, and evaluate their programs
2. Building connections between peacebuilding programs, organizations, evaluators, and researchers to improve collaboration and push us towards greater evidence-based programming
3. Conducting research that enriches the field

Improving DM&E Capacity

AfP must continue to raise the bar for peacebuilding practice, first and foremost on L&E, which the recent Member Senior Leader survey identified as the highest priority among our three pillars.  Over nearly a decade of AfP-led programming and research, we have identified a lack of DM&E capacity as a critical barrier for entry for local peacebuilders and organizations. This capacity deficit exacerbates other obstacles imposed by the international aid community, including risk aversion, prejudice, operational constraints, and a general skepticism that local actors have the requisite depth, scope, and scale of impact.

Building Connections & Improving Collaboration

AfP will further advance our work to convene the peacebuilding field, break down sectoral silos, and put peace at the forefront of public dialogues. AfP further serves as the field’s leading organizer, creating strategic networks that amplify the power of peace and developing powerful strategic coalitions to harness collective action for peace. This work includes efforts to improve AfP’s communication and branding, broaden our network strength globally and inter-sectorially, continue to expand PeaceCon to an internationally recognized, best-in-class peacebuilding conference, and support new narratives for peacebuilding through coalition and campaign building.

Learn’s more about AfP’s Second Annual Peacebuilding M&E Solutions Forum and check out presentations that you may have missed!

Field-Wide Research

The peacebuilding field continues to lag behind fields such as education and public health in developing a strong culture of monitoring, evaluating, and embracing practices of adaptive learning. Theories of change and approaches of effective peacebuilding abound, but many are largely unproven. Furthermore, the field is still in the beginning phases of developing evidence about what works, how to measure results, whether programs are having the desired impact—and, if so, at what level. The field struggles to show evidence of where interventions have led to a clear reduction in violence or increase in cooperation.

This lack of evidence is one of the greatest challenges we face as a field. Donors and policymakers have repeatedly questioned funding without clear evidence on the impact of peacebuilding. Therefore, the field continues to grapple with tremendous resource constraints and limited ability to prove our impact and make the case for peace. To support our advocacy, we are driving a field-wide cultural shift toward learning and evaluation to translate case by case peacebuilding successes into a robust body of evidence on our collective impact. AfP has built the Peacebuilding Evaluation Consortium, with the support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, into a field-wide effort to address the unique challenges of measuring and learning from peacebuilding programs. We are increasingly linking our growing evidence base to advocacy and communications, engaging in narrative work that helps the public and corporations understand peace.

Learn more about our work:

The Peacebuilding Evaluation Consortium

The Effective Inter-religious Action in Peacebuilding Program

The Peacebuilding M&E Solutions Forum

For more information or to be involved with AfP’s evaluation work, contact Jessica Baumgardner-Zuzik, jessica@allianceforpeacebuilding.org.