Throughout the analysis, a critical postcolonial lens was applied as the governing meta-theoretical framework, drawing on De Sousa Santos’s (2014) sociology of absences and epistemologies of the South, the decolonial tradition associated with Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013) on colonial matrices of power, and Nkrumah’s (1964) foundational Pan-African political philosophy. This lens served not merely as a thematic category but as an interpretive orientation shaping how the literature was read, what silences and tensions were identified, and whose voices were recognised as authoritative. Specifically, it asked: whose knowledge counts? Who sets the evaluation agenda? And what structural conditions reproduce epistemological inequality in African evaluation? This reflexive, power-sensitive orientation is itself a methodological expression of the MAE values the article analyses.

Made in Africa Evaluation did not emerge from a single intellectual moment. It evolved through more than two decades of sustained institutional effort and discursive struggle (Table 1). Its institutional home has always been the AfrEA, which was established in 1999 with the explicit aspiration of fostering a distinctively African evaluation culture (Tirivanhu 2022) (Table 2). From its founding, AfrEA carried the ambition of reclaiming evaluation for and by Africa – an ambition that was formally crystallised at the organisation’s 2005 conference when the then-president issued what has since become the founding rallying call of the MAE movement: ‘we need to do evaluation in our own words, make evaluation our own’ (UNDP Strategic Innovation 2024). This was not merely a rhetorical gesture; it was a political declaration that evaluation in Africa required decolonisation as urgently as governance or education. The initiative was endogenous – born from within the continent – even as it attracted considerable interest and paradoxically, support from outside Africa (Africa Social Work & Development Network [ASWDNet] 2023).

Chilisa and Mertens (2021) articulate the intellectual core of this political declaration most precisely, defining MAE as an approach that resists the uncritical adoption of Western values and standards in the evaluation of African programmes – a resistance that is simultaneously epistemological, methodological and political (as cited in Tirivanhu 2022).

A foundational premise of MAE’s African character is the recognition that evaluation practice in Africa is not, and has never been, culturally neutral. It is instead deeply inscribed by a colonial history that positioned European frameworks of knowledge, value and method as universal, while rendering African ways of knowing invisible, illegitimate or merely supplementary. As Abrahams et al. (2022) document, the M&E space in Africa is a microcosm of the broader African development landscape – one dominated by Western funding, evaluation commissioners and theoretical frameworks, with evaluation training curricula also shaped predominantly by Global North orientations. Current evaluation models remain largely Westernised, constituting what Moilwa (2024) describes as ‘business as usual’ – an approach that structurally ‘leaves people behind’.

The power asymmetry at the heart of this problem is structural rather than incidental. African evaluators have been systematically positioned as data collectors for evaluations designed, theorised and interpreted by externally appointed experts, with donor-determined theories, methods and approaches setting the evaluative agenda (Chilisa 2024). Chilisa and Mertens (2021) name this condition ‘epistemic violence’ – a concept drawn from the postcolonial tradition that captures the harm caused by the systematic invalidation and marginalisation of African ways of knowing through the imposition of external epistemological frameworks. Importantly, epistemic violence is not merely an injury to African pride; it produces structurally distorted evaluations that measure the wrong things, with the wrong tools, for the wrong audiences. As Frehiwot (2022) contends, MAE confronts an uphill battle against epistemic injustice in knowledge production and the unequal power relations embedded in donor-prescribed development ideologies that prioritise quantifiable outputs over qualitative transformation (as cited in Abrahams et al. 2022).

What is distinctively ‘African’ about MAE, in this critical dimension, is not merely its content but its political consciousness – its refusal to regard the colonial legacy of evaluation as either natural or inevitable, and its commitment to dismantling the institutional and epistemological structures through which that legacy is reproduced (Table 3).

The most philosophically distinctive dimension of MAE is its grounding in African ontologies and epistemologies, which depart fundamentally from the individualistic, positivist and secular assumptions that undergird mainstream Western evaluation. Chilisa et al. (2016) identify the African relational paradigm as the epistemological cornerstone of MAE – a paradigm constituted by worldviews in which selfhood, knowledge and value are understood not as individual possessions but as relational achievements, embedded in relationships between people, communities, environments and the living and the nonliving.

This relational ontology is expressed most comprehensively through Ubuntu philosophy, which represents Africa’s most widely theorised philosophical contribution to evaluation discourse (Table 4). Ubuntu is not merely a cultural value but a complete epistemological architecture – a philosophy, worldview, natural ethics and way of knowing that centres the basic interconnection of human presence, subordinate to care, collective values, harmony, respect and responsiveness (Bhuda & Marumo 2022). As Abur and Mugumbate (2022) elaborate, Ubuntu articulates the individual always through their relationships with family, community, environment and spirituality – positioning community not as context but as the very site of knowledge production. Crucially, this means that African epistemology begins not with the individual but with the community, such that knowledge itself is regarded as a communal rather than individual possession (Mangena n.d.).

However, a critical evaluation of Ubuntu’s role in MAE reveals an important tension that the literature has not always addressed with sufficient rigour: the risk of epistemological essentialism. Ubuntu is a philosophical tradition concentrated most strongly in Southern and East African contexts and does not straightforwardly represent the epistemic traditions of all 2000-plus language communities across the continent (Gqaleni & Foláyan 2026, as cited in Frontiers in Research Metrics and Analytics 2026). When MAE scholarship deploys Ubuntu as the paradigmatic expression of African philosophy, it risks constructing a homogeneous ‘African identity’ that silences the profound diversity of African thought. This is not a merely academic objection; it has practical consequences for whether MAE can genuinely serve as a continent-wide evaluation framework or whether it reproduces its own form of intellectual hegemony.

Scholars have responded constructively to this tension by broadening MAE’s philosophical foundations. Asante and Archibald (2023) introduce Nnoboa – a Ghanaian system of communal collaboration grounded in reciprocal agricultural labour – and Sankofa – the Akan philosophical principle of drawing wisdom from the past to navigate the future – as additional epistemological foundations for MAE that build upon, rather than merely replicate, the Ubuntu tradition. These concepts extend MAE’s philosophical reach into West African intellectual traditions and demonstrate that MAE’s capacity for epistemological diversity is a strength rather than an inconsistency.

The concept of indigenisation represents the practical operationalisation of MAE’s philosophical commitments. Chilisa et al. (2016) define indigenisation as the productive blending of an imported discipline with the generation of new concepts and approaches from within a host culture – a process that, in the evaluation context, can be measured along three axes: the degree to which evaluation processes are centred on African people; the degree to which evaluation standards, tools and methodologies originate from African realities and worldviews; and the degree to which African stakeholders regard these ways of knowing as valid and valuable (as cited in Fish 2022). The indigenisation of evaluation is thus not merely a technical matter of adapting instruments; it is a substantive epistemological repositioning that relocates African knowledge at the centre rather than the periphery of evaluative inquiry.

In practice, this repositioning takes several forms. At the methodological level, it involves integrating IKS – which Moilwa (2024) defines as historically, environmentally and culturally grounded knowledge developed by local communities – into evaluation design, data collection and interpretation. At the relational level, it involves reconstituting the evaluator-community relationship on the basis of mutual respect rather than expert authority. As one field evaluator captured it directly: if you come with a power differential, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get the truth (UNDP Strategic Innovation 2024). This insight is epistemologically significant – it suggests that hierarchical evaluation relationships do not merely affect the ethical quality of the process but the epistemic reliability of its findings.

The Uganda Baraza initiative provides a compelling empirical illustration of indigenisation in practice. Baraza – a Swahili term for a traditional community council or gathering – functioned as a platform through which technical officers and political representatives provided citizens with evaluative information about public service delivery, while citizens in turn monitored the usage of public resources (Moilwa 2024). This is not merely community participation appended to an externally designed evaluation; it is the evaluation reconstituted around an indigenous institutional form, with its own norms of accountability, authority and truth-telling. The MAE use of development indicators that are contextually aligned to the values and aspirations of Africans – rather than to donor or global development benchmarks – is both a practical and a political expression of this indigenisation imperative (Chilisa 2015, as cited in ASWDNet 2023).

Decolonisation and indigenisation are analytically distinct processes within the MAE framework, although they are deeply interdependent (Table 5). Where indigenisation is primarily concerned with the positive project of embedding African knowledge at the centre of evaluation, decolonisation is primarily concerned with the critical project of dismantling the colonial structures that prevent it. The decolonisation of evaluation is understood as a multifaceted and ongoing process: it refuses the blind adoption of Western evaluation theories and standards; it adapts existing evaluation models to ensure contextual and cultural relevance; and it generates novel evaluation practices, theories and methodologies rooted in African philosophical and cultural traditions (Chilisa et al. 2016; Fish 2022).

This decolonial project is also explicitly political. As Chilisa et al. (2016) assert, genuine decolonisation of evaluation requires the restructuring of power relations within the global architecture of evaluation knowledge generation – not merely the introduction of African methods, but the redistribution of authority over what gets evaluated, when, by whom and with what conceptual frameworks (as cited in Tirivanhu 2022). Dlakavu, Mathebula and Mkhize (2022) complement this structural argument with a strategic and advocacy dimension, calling for the mobilisation of evaluation practitioners, scholars and stakeholders behind Afrocentric evaluation practice – recognising that decolonisation requires not only intellectual innovation but institutional and political contestation (as cited in Abrahams et al. 2022).

The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) represents perhaps the most institutionally significant example of decolonisation in African evaluation governance. Established under Article 5(2) of the African Union’s Constitutive Act of 2000, and repositioned in 2017 to support monitoring and evaluation of African Union (AU) Agenda 2063, the APRM represents a home-grown accountability mechanism that explicitly rejects the logic of external conditionality in favour of continental peer accountability rooted in African governance traditions (Kizito et al. 2025). Its significance for the MAE argument is substantial: it demonstrates that decolonised evaluation is not merely an academic aspiration but has been operationalised at the highest levels of African political governance.

A critical reading of the MAE literature reveals that MAE is not monolithic (Table 6). It does not advocate a single African evaluation paradigm to replace Western ones. Rather, it advocates a pluralistic epistemological landscape in which multiple African paradigms coexist, each contributing distinct dimensions to the MAE project. Fish (2022) identifies five paradigms relevant to MAE practice: the Afrocentric paradigm, the postcolonial indigenous paradigm, the African relational evaluation paradigm, the transformative evaluation paradigm and the culturally competent evaluation paradigm. This pluralism is itself characteristically African – it reflects the continent’s philosophical diversity rather than imposing a new orthodoxy.

The Afrocentric paradigm, drawing on Molefi Kete Asante’s philosophy of Afrocentricity, positions African people and African perspectives at the analytical centre of inquiry, asserting their right and capacity to generate knowledge on their own terms (Fish 2022). The African relational paradigm, developed most comprehensively by Chilisa et al. (2016), provides the ontological and epistemological scaffolding for relational, community-centred evaluation practice. Together, these paradigms constitute a framework for evaluation that is simultaneously philosophically coherent and contextually flexible.

Perhaps the most theoretically radical element of this pluralistic landscape is the emergent recognition of spiritual ontology as an evaluation epistemology. Chilisa (2024) identifies spiritual reality and relational existence – including what she terms ‘abiotic-biotic relations’, meaning relationships with ancestral knowledge, sacred ecological systems and metaphysical dimensions of community life – as legitimate and powerful tools for evaluation theorising, model building, and knowledge generation. This represents an evolving fifth research and evaluation paradigm that is perhaps the sharpest departure from the secular, material positivism of Western evaluation frameworks. It challenges not merely the methods of Western evaluation but its foundational assumptions about what is real, what is knowable and what counts as evidence.

A further dimension of MAE’s African character concerns the structural question of who conducts evaluation and who benefits from evaluative knowledge. At its most fundamental, MAE insists that genuine African evaluation requires African ownership – not merely African participation in evaluations designed by others, but African agency over the entire evaluative cycle, from the framing of evaluation questions through to the use of findings (Moilwa 2024). This insistence distinguishes MAE from conventional participatory evaluation, which may involve communities in data collection while leaving theoretical, analytical and interpretive authority with external evaluators.

A significant obstacle to this ownership aspiration is the current state of Evaluation Capacity Development (ECD) in Africa. Evaluation Capacity Development in Africa is characterised by donor-centrism – conducted in an unsystematic, project-driven manner oriented towards fulfilling donor accountability requirements rather than building the evaluative capacity of African institutions and communities for their own purposes (Tarsilla 2014, as cited in Tirivanhu 2022). Made in Africa Evaluation’s response to this structural challenge is an ECD model grounded in African institutional frameworks, driven by African professional associations such as AfrEA and national Voluntary Organisations for Professional Evaluation (VOPEs), and explicitly oriented towards building a generation of evaluators who are simultaneously fluent in global evaluation standards and deeply rooted in African knowledge traditions.

Frehiwot’s (2022) pan-African evaluation framework extends this ownership aspiration to a continental scale, recognising that African evaluation sovereignty cannot be achieved within national silos but requires collective institutional infrastructure that reaches across the linguistic, cultural and political borders that colonial administration inscribed (as cited in Abrahams et al. 2022). This Pan-Africanist dimension of MAE – its insistence on continental solidarity as a precondition for epistemological emancipation – aligns it with the broader African political tradition that understands liberation as a collective rather than individual achievement.

A rigorous analysis of the MAE literature cannot avoid its internal contradictions and unresolved theoretical challenges. Three deserve sustained critical attention, as they go beyond the surface-level acknowledgements common in advocacy-oriented MAE scholarship.

The first and most consequential tension is the risk of epistemological essentialism. By invoking ‘African’ philosophy, ‘African’ identity and ‘African’ ways of knowing as the foundation of a unified evaluation framework, MAE risks constructing a homogeneous African subject that does not exist. Africa’s 54 nations, 2000-plus languages and vast diversity of cultural, religious and philosophical traditions cannot be reduced to a single epistemological standpoint, however sympathetically conceived. Chirau, Ramasobana and Ngwabi (2022) note that one of the persistent challenges facing MAE is the over-reliance on a particular conception of African identity that may be more representative of specific regional or cultural traditions than of the continent as a whole. The antidote to this essentialism is not the abandonment of MAE’s African-rootedness but rather a more rigorously pluralistic and self-critical approach to the diversity of African philosophies – precisely the approach exemplified by Asante and Archibald’s (2023) introduction of Nnoboa and Sankofa alongside, rather than in place of, Ubuntu.

The second tension concerns the boundary between romanticisation and recognition of IKS. Not all indigenous knowledge is beneficial, progressive or compatible with the values of gender justice, human rights and democratic accountability that MAE simultaneously espouses. Some indigenous practices encode patriarchy, gerontocracy or environmental exploitation. A mature MAE framework must develop evaluative criteria for distinguishing between IKS worth centring and those that require critical interrogation – a challenge that the existing MAE literature has not fully addressed (Blaser-Mapitsa 2022).

The third tension is the persistent gap between MAE’s conceptual sophistication and its practical operationalisation. A minority voice in the literature argues that MAE remains an underdeveloped body of knowledge, lacking the distinctive tools, instruments and practical guidelines that would enable evaluators to conduct genuinely MAE-grounded evaluations (Chilisa 2024). The majority counterargument – that the problem is not underdevelopment but invisibility, perpetuated by the hostility or indifference of Western-dominated evaluation institutions – does not entirely dissolve this challenge (Chilisa 2024). Tirivanhu (2022) acknowledges that putting MAE principles into practice remains difficult, given the persistence of donor-imposed evaluation frameworks, the scarcity of MAE-oriented training programmes, and the absence of widely accepted MAE-specific tools and instruments. Furthermore, the epistemological tensions between universalist claims of scientific objectivity and MAE’s contextual claims represent a genuine philosophical challenge. As one practitioner remarked: ‘Science is science, data in one context is data in another, and the objectivity of the scientific method cannot be affected by the subjectivity of contextual realities’ (Chilisa 2024). The literature does not fully resolve this debate, and a mature MAE framework must engage it directly rather than dismissing it as a defence of epistemological colonialism.

Made in Africa Evaluation does not position itself as an isolationist project. It does not advocate for Africa’s withdrawal from global evaluation knowledge but for a transformed relationship with it – one in which Africa occupies the position of contributor and co-producer rather than perpetual recipient. The values of internationalisation are explicitly built into MAE’s conceptual architecture: MAE aspires to be used and learned from beyond Africa, enriching global evaluation theory and practice with distinctively African insights (ASWDNet 2023).

This aspiration is significant because it reframes the standard narrative of knowledge transfer, in which the Global North produces evaluation theory and exports it to the Global South. Made in Africa Evaluation insists on a bidirectional knowledge economy in which African evaluation scholarship is a resource for the global community, not merely a local adaptation of externally validated frameworks. Made in Africa Evaluation is for inclusion, ownership, resilience, equity and development justice – values that resonate with evaluation movements across the Global South (UNDP Strategic Innovation 2024). The knowledge base coming from Africa is a powerful strategy to inform evaluation practice and therefore transform evaluation from an MAE perspective (Chilisa 2024).

The South-to-South Evaluation Initiative (S2SE), spearheaded by AfrEA alongside four other Global South regional evaluation associations, represents the most concrete institutional expression of this globalising ambition – positioning MAE not as a regional concern but as a contribution to a worldwide movement for epistemological justice in evaluation (Chilisa 2024).