Strengthening the Fire: Indigenous Evaluation Leadership in Africa

In recent years, the movement for Indigenous evaluation has been growing, fuelled by calls for locally grounded approaches that reflect the lived realities, decision-making traditions, and aspirations of Indigenous communities. Two landmark reports—by Mr John T. Njovu (Zambia) and Dr Awuor Ponge and his team (Kenya)—offer powerful, practice-based insights into how evaluation can be decolonised, revitalised, and strengthened to serve Indigenous peoples on their own terms.

Two Projects, One Commitment

Mr Njovu’s report, Developing Indigenous Monitoring and Evaluation Tools and Development Curriculum, is a clarion call to centre African Indigenous knowledge systems within evaluation. Rooted in the experiences of the Lamba people and broader Bantu traditions, Mr Njovu introduces Insaka and Tuwimba as culturally grounded models of learning, reflection, and decision-making. These are not metaphors but real, lived structures of engagement—gathering places of dialogue, justice, spirituality, and consensus. His work challenges Western dominance in evaluation and insists on the value of restoring Indigenous pedagogies, not just for evaluation practice, but also for the curriculum that shapes future evaluators.

Meanwhile, Dr Ponge was leading a project with Wycklif Ochieng’ Oduor, Collins Oduka Odhiambo, Grace Wanjiru Murigo, Aisha Adhiambo Awuor, Boniface Tsuma Nzai and Alexanda Kisioi Koech. Their report, ​Developing Indigenous Evaluation Methodologies with Kenyan Communities, documents the collaborative creation of evaluation frameworks with the Ogiek and Mijikenda communities. The study, part of EvalIndigenous’ Blossoming Project, draws from ethnographic and participatory research methods to foreground traditional decision-making, storytelling, environmental stewardship, and moral teaching as vital sources of evaluative authority. Elders and community leaders—often excluded from formal evaluations—are shown to be central to culturally meaningful definitions of success, wellbeing, and development.

Shared Lessons for Evaluators and Evaluation Commissioners

Mr Njovu and Dr Ponge and his team, in different but complementary ways, offer a set of urgent and important lessons for those who commission or undertake evaluations of initiatives in Indigenous communities in Africa:

1. Evaluation Must Reflect Local Worldviews - Whether in the Kaya forests of the Mijikenda or the Insaka of the Bemba, decision-making is not individualistic or technocratic—it is collective, spiritual, and ancestral. Evaluators must engage with the systems of meaning that Indigenous peoples use to assess progress, conflict, justice, and restoration.
2. Language, Storytelling, and Ritual Are Data - Both reports powerfully argue that oral traditions, metaphors, proverbs, and rituals are legitimate forms of knowledge—and should be treated as such in evaluation design. Incorporating storytelling into data collection is not a quaint add-on; it is an epistemological shift.
3. Build with, not for - Mr Njovu’s work on curriculum development and Dr Ponge’s participatory fieldwork exemplify what it means to build Indigenous evaluation with communities, not for them. Funders should invest in slow, relationship-based work that centres local facilitators, community archives, and Indigenous control of knowledge.
4. Support Archiving, Curriculum, and Youth Inclusion - Both reports signal the importance of sustaining knowledge transmission. This means investing in digital and oral archiving, supporting the creation of Indigenous evaluation curricula, and ensuring youth can access intergenerational knowledge.
5. Policy and Practice Must Be Grounded in Indigenous Rights - Dr Ponge explicitly ties evaluation to issues of land tenure, political representation, and cultural recognition. Mr Njovu does the same through his insistence that colonial epistemologies must be unseated. Evaluation, then, is not neutral—it is either complicit in or resistant to historical injustice.

Global Implications

Though situated in Africa, these reports resonate globally. They offer pathways for evaluators to re-centre Indigenous ways of knowing, being and evaluating. More than that, they show how Africa can lead: not as a recipient of development knowledge, but as a generator of evaluation futures rooted in relationality, interdependence, and cultural continuity. As EvalIndigenous continues to nurture these blossoms, the work of Mr Njovu and Dr Ponge and his team reminds us of the fire we carry: that evaluation, when reclaimed by Indigenous communities, can be a force for renewal, healing, and sovereignty.