Evaluating and measuring impact: where and how?

On 12 and 13 November, a workshop on “Evaluation in international organisations” took place at CERN. Fourteen internal auditors and planning and policy analysts, from six different international organisations, discussed whether and how to evaluate the impact of their organisations’ programmes on the target beneficiaries. 

Participants of the “Evaluation in international organisations” workshop at CERN.

“Evaluation”, a relatively recent but fast growing discipline, deals with the systematic and objective assessment of the impact of policies and programmes on the target beneficiaries – often society at large. In the past few years, other international organisations have created an evaluation function within their internal structure, whose role is to measure the impact of their public policies. “In the first instance we wanted to understand what the difference between evaluation and internal audit is and whether CERN could benefit from building evaluation competencies,” explains Laure Esteveny, Head of Internal Audit at CERN, who proposed this initiative. “It is actually part of the internal audit’s role to keep a watch on best practices and trends and to make proposals where appropriate. In the wake of the joint training initiatives that we regularly set up with peer organisations in the Geneva area, I decided to organise a workshop on this topic.”

Organised in collaboration with CERN’s Learning and Development Group, the workshop was a great learning opportunity for the participants. “The programme combined theoretical lectures and practical activities,” explains Erwin Mosselmans, Technical Management Training coordinator. “With the agreement of the IdeaSquare project leader Markus Nordberg, who kindly accepted our invitation to introduce the subject, participants were invited to reflect on how the impact of the IdeaSquare programme on its targeted population could best be evaluated.”

by Antonella Del Rosso