The Centre for Learning and Evaluation and Results for Anglophone Africa (CLEAR-AA) is a response to an increased demand from government and civil society for practical and applied Evaluation Capacity Development (ECD) weighed against the limited availability (supply) of relevant services in many developing countries in the region. With respect to its service offerings, CLEAR-AA develops and provides high-quality, applied, cost effective regional technical assistance and capacity building programmes, and connects with global learning to produce innovative materials, methods to enable practical knowledge-sharing on Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) and Performance Management (PM). CLEAR-AA is located within the Commerce, Law and Management Faculty at Witwatersrand University (Wits), located in Johannesburg, South Africa.
CLEAR-AA primarily develops and shares global knowledge, facilitates peer-learning, knowledge exchange and enhances capacity to benefit broader M&E communities of practice. Our outcome statement focuses on the development of evaluation capacity (including ‘how to’ and ‘what works’ in ECD), research to deepen collaboration and motivation for evaluation demand, as well as skills and knowledge to contribute stakeholders using evidence to make effective decisions and to improve development outcomes. CLEAR-AA pursues these objectives through strategic programmatic areas (or business lines).
These thematic areas of work have been designed to achieve the outcomes outlined in CLEAR-AA’s Theory of Change. CLEAR-AA believes that evidence-based policy making is key to equitable and sustainable development in the region. We believe that by strengthening both the demand for evaluations, as well as building capacity of the professional evaluation sector, we will deepen democracy, and make better-informed policy decisions. Through ensuring evidence as the basis of investment decisions by the private sector, we believe the investment environment in Anglophone Africa will be more inclusive and accountable. And through engaging with citizens, local government, and technical sectors, we will have more sustainable and liveable cities. Evaluation is a key tool for political decision-making, and by focusing on both capacity to produce and use evaluations, CLEAR-AA believes that its work strengthens democracy, just governance, and development across the region.
Modern organisations will agree that appropriate data, managing it, collaboration and sharing, is critical to being innovative. In CLEAR-AA we use our data to mine for hidden “gems of insight” that informs new product development and to codify and deliberately track our tacit knowledge. Given the overload of data in the M&E space, the CLEAR-AA mobile app is a real-time tool to manage a body of specialized knowledge and information to our Communities of Practice (COPs) to scale the use of M&E knowledge and construct an innovative environment that will address future needs.
The application is the first official release of Uwazi. A collaboration tool for use by Clear AA and Twende Mbele. The app uses Maps to point out the different offices by Clear AA and Twende Mbele, once in any of these offices/business profiles the users can then use the multiple features that are built into the app like send messages, view documents, manage issues and much more.