A paradigm shift from monitoring and evaluation to interdisciplinary evaluative systems thinking: The status of evaluative processes and use in African Universities

This paper is an initial attempt to assess the status and use of evaluative processes in African universities to inform their strategic decisions in face of growing demands for universities to transform and be more relevant in development and innovation processes. The desired transformation is part of the broad organisational change process that requires universities to adapt to meet the ever increasing complex development challenges of national and regional scope. The study draws from evaluation studies and specific reports over a 10 year time horizon in over 20 African universities in 10 countries. The finding reveals that universities have fully established Planning Units with clear operational strategies and monitoring frameworks. However in practice, monitoring is largely activity based and used to assess compliance with work plans and budgets and few universities have well defined monitoring, evaluation, and learning strategies and where they exist, implementation is limited or at most, ad hoc. The paper seeks to build on the body of growing literature on evaluative thinking and the need for entities to put in place adaptive systems for learning and improving.