An Attempt to Integrate Empowerment Evaluation and Crosscultural Evaluation

Abstract

Western countries currently donate large sums of money to developing countries. This money is used to fund programs that provide humanitarian assistance, protect the environment, build democracy, and encourage economic growth. In the implementation of such programs, donor agencies often adopt a top-down approach in which intended beneficiaries have little involvement. Empowerment evaluation could be used as a tool for over coming this problem. Empowerment evaluation is, as the name implies, a collection of evaluation techniques that promote the empowerment process. The empowerment process has been thought of as having five stages, and evaluation can play an important role in most of these stages.