Team

Benita Williams Evaluation (BWE) is a South African consultancy with a small team of dedicated evaluation professionals committed to social development and transformational change. We value the importance of data and evaluations to track progress and provide evidence of immediate and longer-term changes brought about by organizations and initiatives. Our work involves guiding clients through the processes of asking questions, collecting evidence, sharing results, and making decisions, ensuring that the methods are appropriate to their specific contexts. We also focus on enhancing the capabilities of organizations to leverage their data and evaluation systems to learn, adapt and improve.

We challenge our clients to use their expertise, resources, and enthusiasm to affect local and national systems – Either through changing mental models, practices and policies or through affecting relationships, connections, power dynamics and resource flows. We prioritize developing long-term relationships with our clients, customizing our evaluation feedback to their particular needs and sometimes taking on a more developmental role within implementation learning processes.

Our team, highly skilled in designing and implementing evaluations and evaluation frameworks, collaborates with a wide network of researchers and experts across various sectors. Our core team members come from diverse academic backgrounds, including Research Psychology, Development Studies, Geography, and Computer Science, with advanced studies in Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) and research methods. Over the past two decades, we have conducted impact, outcome, implementation, and design evaluations, in sectors including agriculture, health, youth development, social enterprise development, science and technology and environmental issues. Notably, most of our work has been conducted in the education sector, ranging from Early Childhood Development to post-school preparation programmes. We have a good understanding of the contextual issues affecting education development programmes in South Africa.

Our expertise extends to testing various theoretical approaches to evaluation, always focusing on delivering helpful information for a deliberately defined evaluation user. Recently, our focus has been on understanding systemic approaches to education development and how to sustain and scale the outcomes of development programmes.