What is ‘African’ about the Made in Africa Evaluation? An epistemological emancipation endeavour

Abstract

Background: The Made in Africa Evaluation (MAE) framework has emerged as one of the most significant intellectual and institutional responses to the dominance of Western evaluation paradigms on the African continent, yet the question of what is distinctively ‘African’ about it remains undertheorised and contested in the evaluation literature.
Objectives: This article interrogates what is distinctively ‘African’ about the MAE by analysing the philosophical, epistemological, methodological, institutional and political dimensions through which MAE asserts its African identity, tracing its evolution from its inception in 1999 through to the most current scholarly contributions of 2025–2026.
Method: A qualitative interpretive literature review oriented towards critical synthesis was conducted, drawing on systematic narrative synthesis and thematic analysis and guided throughout by a critical postcolonial meta-theoretical lens.
Results: Made in Africa Evaluation’s Africanness is grounded in Ubuntu philosophy, African indigenous knowledge systems, the African relational and Afrocentric paradigms, communal ways of knowing, and the institutional architecture of African Evaluation Association and the African Peer Review Mechanism. Unresolved tensions persist between universalist and contextualist epistemologies, theory and practice, and local ownership and global relevance.
Conclusion: Made in Africa Evaluation constitutes an assertion of Africa’s right and intellectual capacity to define, conduct and own evaluation on its own terms, enriching both African evaluation practice and the global evaluation enterprise.
Contribution: This article provides the first comprehensive, multi-dimensional framework synthesising the philosophical, epistemological, methodological, institutional and political dimensions of MAE’s African identity, advancing the theoretical foundations of the MAE discourse.