It was a real privilege to be invited to the inaugural olympism365 summit. Such an inspiring conference with 100+ partners from across the world focussing on how to accelerate and amplify sport for development.
There was a clear commitment to intensifying collective action and consortium working, with an unwavering focus on contributing to systems change and moving away from individual, isolated and unsustainable projects. And in scaling reach and impact through resourcing networks of locally-led organisations that are taking forward contextually-relevant, equitable and intentionally-designed approaches.
I had the honour of chairing the session on realising the potential for shared measurement for global and regional partnerships to really assess what works in sport for development – making a difference to people, communities and development goals THROUGH sport.
The discussion generated in our session really echoed the conversations elsewhere in the conference, reiterating to me that evaluation is too often built separately from programmes itself but that the best approaches mirror the delivery. Both need to be:
*equitable
*clear on what success looks like
*collaborative
*willing to adapt to learnings
*tailored to local needs and
*driven by those involved.
These should be our guide rails.
Far too often I spend time with organisations and conferences talking about how to embed evaluation and bridge the gap between evaluation and practice, these discussions reiterated to me that we’re really just talking about how to drive evidence led practice, which rightfully puts the emphasis on the evaluators to not just rigorously assess learnings, but to use evaluation to drive meaningful change.
Certainly, the core of the conference was about collaboration and shared endeavour towards the sustainable development goals. Our approach to evaluation should be the same. Of course the devil is always in the detail, with many partners ranging from development banks, sports organisations, Olympic committees and UN agencies all feeding into shared measurement. The conference showed it was a collaboration of the willing.
And great to see International Olympic Committee – IOC commit as a result of the summit to encompass context-specific and shared analysis of impact in order to generate localised and aggregated insights and social value measurement – this is crucial to achieve greater collective action & consortium funding.
