Team

Benita Williams is a South African evaluator and current director of Benita Williams Evaluation. Ms Williams designs, implements and manages monitoring and evaluation projects. Over the past seventeen years, she has conducted various evaluations of education, youth development, income generation and health initiatives in Southern Africa for corporate donors, government departments and community-based NGOs. She has experience in the sophisticated qualitative and statistical analysis of education data, voluntary counselling and testing/ health behaviour survey data and skills-audits. Recently her focus has been on the evaluation of education support initiatives, particularly initiatives employing ICTs for education and development. For the CSIR Meraka Institute, she served as a developmental evaluator on the evaluation of the high-profile rollout of e-textbooks in 26 schools in the Nciba circuit in Cofimvaba in the Eastern Cape. She is team lead for an evaluation of a Zenex Foundation Secondary School development project across three provinces, she is evaluating the impact of a post-secondary school intervention and assists the Gauteng Education Department with the knowledge management of a strategic School Twinning programme. Ms Williams frequently works as Developmental Evaluator and has done evaluations informed by Realistic Evaluation and Systems Evaluation theories. Ms Williams has academic training in the field of Research Psychology (University of Pretoria) at Master’s level and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg. In 2009-10, Benita served as executive secretary for the African Evaluation Association, a network of evaluation associations and evaluators across Africa. Benita was the founding treasurer for the South African Monitoring and Evaluation Association, SAMEA a voluntary association of evaluators and evaluation users in SA, and served until September 2009. Benita has published in evaluation and builds the capacity of VOPEs like SAMEA through a web-toolkit hosted at www.vopetoolkit.ioce.net.

Daleen Botha is a director and evaluator at Benita Williams Evaluation. She has more than ten years’ experience in monitoring and evaluation, mostly working in the education sector. She also has more than 15 years’ experience in project management working as an ICT project manager. Daleen has worked with government institutions in South Africa such as the South African Council of Educators and the Gauteng Department of Education. She has also worked with community-based NGOs like the Sumbandila Trust and private foundations such as the Zenex Foundation. Ms Botha is adept at project management, qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, and also has extensive experience of developing M&E frameworks, Theories of Change, Logical Frameworks and Result chains, as well as data management. Daleen has participated mostly in implementation and outcome evaluations. She has been involved in evaluations in the education sector working with the Zenex Foundation and the CSIR. Daleen holds a BSc Honours in Computer Science as well as a post-graduate diploma in M&E from the University of Stellenbosch. She is a member of the South African Monitoring and Evaluation Association (SAMEA).

Fazeela Hoosen is a director and evaluator at Benita Williams Evaluation. Ms Hoosen has experience of undertaking utilization-focused evaluations in the education sector, which involves qualitative and quantitative analysis. She has undertaken and assisted in the design of quasi-experimental control group designs to monitor learner results in ICT education programmes within schools. She has recently directed her focus to providing M&E technical assistance to and evaluating governance networks that work across Africa. She has experience in evaluating community-based initiatives like the Smart Start Early Childhood Development Franchise and government initiatives such as the National Science Week Programme of the Department of Science and Technology (2011). Ms Hoosen holds a Master’s Degree with a Post¬graduate Diploma in Monitoring & Evaluation. She served a three-year term (2014 – 2017) as Board member of the South African Monitoring and Evaluation Association (SAMEA). Ms Hoosen is involved in global initiatives to support and create opportunities for young and emerging evaluators to build and strengthen their evaluation practice.

Dr Kelly is a researcher and evaluator at Benita Williams Evaluation. She has experience in both qualitative and quantitative research design, data-collection methods, and technical analysis, as well as project management. She has a PhD in Sociology, an MPhil in social research methods and a post-graduate diploma in monitoring and evaluation methods and held doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships at Yale University and the University of Cape Town. She has 10 years of experience in evaluating the impact of grant-making and corporate social investment in the fields of education, social protection and health. She also has a strong research interest in social policy and issues. She has worked on projects in Zambia, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, the United States and most provinces in South Africa, and has worked remotely on projects with partners in Senegal, Mauritius, Mozambique, Ghana and Rwanda. She has worked on projects for the International Labour Organisation, World Health Organisation, USAID, Carnegie Corporation, Coronation Fund, Equal Education, Better Health Programmes SA, General Motors, NACOSA and DG Murray Trust and Anglo American, among others.

Joy Banda is a junior evaluator with Benita Williams Evaluation where she assists with the design, management and implementation of evaluations. She has worked on the evaluation of a school improvement programme funded by Anglo American South Africa, an evaluation of a Systemic Social Investment Strategy of FRF/FREF, as well as an evaluation of Zenex Foundation funded school improvement initiatives. Joy previously worked as a consultant at Oxford Policy Management (OPM) South Africa. Among the projects Joy has worked on are an impact evaluation of Discovery Project 2 (DP-2), a DFID funded multi-country education project in Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria aimed at addressing barriers to education amongst young girls as well as an Evaluation of TradeMark East Africa. She also worked on an evaluation of an HIV prevention programme, Bumb’Ingomso, implemented by the DG Murray Trust in the Eastern Cape aimed at reducing HIV vulnerability among young women and girls. Through her involvement in various evaluation projects, Joy has developed key competencies in qualitative data analysis, data collection instrument design, report writing and overseeing fieldworker training. She also has a demonstrated understanding of monitoring and evaluation Theory of Change design. Ms Banda holds a Master’s degree in Development Studies. She is currently completing a Postgraduate Diploma in Monitoring & Evaluation at Stellenbosch University.