Evaluation of the Southern and Eastern Africa Regional Centre for ...

16evaluation is how the 2010 MTR identified a critical mass of likeminded people andempirical knowledge on a range of topics had been created but nonetheless stressed:‘The challenge is to implement initiatives that will coalesce and energies this richresource and leverage its potential in order to start making a bigger impact at thepolicy level. This will require collaboration with activist, NGOs and CBOs. It couldalso be expedited if the graduates in the various countries form a formal or semiformalassociation…’ (p. 21).Whether this potentially represents a new role demanding more staff and fundraisingremains to be seen in the evaluation presented here. Our contribution is toproblematize these issues that were only implicitly raised in documentationassociated with SEARCWL and to hopefully identify some ways to deal with them.In order to pose the question of whether something could have been donedifferently we therefore also need to look at some of the assumptions in the theoryof change of SEARCWL.