Ooh — I missed this.
The National Evaluation Policy Framework 2025, published in February 2026, is worth a read for anyone doing evaluation work in South Africa. Not necessarily because it will revolutionise how we evaluate, but because it gives a useful sense of the definitions, questions and forms of evaluative practice that our national system, and the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation, considers important.
There are some things I particularly like.
First, the framework goes beyond simply listing the familiar evaluation types — diagnostic, design, implementation, outcome, economic, impact and synthesis evaluations. It also deliberately broadens the conversation to evaluative practices and approaches: evaluative thinking in monitoring, evaluative workshops, rapid evaluations, evidence synthesis, institutional reviews, systems thinking, foresight and equity considerations.
I like this. Evaluation is not only something that happens when we commission a formal evaluation. Evaluative thinking can be embedded in monitoring, reflection, strategy and decision-making. And I was particularly pleased to see systems thinking in evaluation explicitly named.
The sustainability criterion is also nicely expansive. It asks the deceptively simple question: “Will the benefits last?” But the definition goes much further than financial sustainability, asking us to consider the economic, social, environmental and institutional capacities of the systems needed to sustain benefits, as well as resilience, risks and trade-offs.
And then there are two criteria we should be rather proud of: Climate and Ecosystems Health (CEH) and Transformative Equity (TE). These are South African additions to the usual OECD-DAC criteria, explicitly bringing environmental systems and systemic inequity into how we judge interventions.
That feels like a genuinely useful contribution from South Africa to evaluation practice.
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