Rick Davies

Dr Rick Davies is an experienced evaluator and developer of evaluation tools. He has 30+ years’ experience working with NGOs, bilateral and multilateral institutions on the evaluation of international development aid programmes. This work includes evaluability assessments, the articulation of programme Theories of Change, the development of monitoring and evaluation frameworks, the design, lead and participation in evaluations, the synthesis of lessons learned from multiple evaluations, and quality assurance reviews of evaluations undertaken by other parties.

Rick is also a member of the Association of Professional Futurists Evaluation Task Force, headed by Annette Gardiner, PhD, MPH.

His PhD research was on organisational learning in NGOs in Bangladesh. Based on that research he has since developed:
• ParEvo, a free-to-use web-assisted participatory process for the exploration of alternative futures
• The Most Significant Change (MSC) technique, a tool for participatory impact monitoring, that is being used in multiple developed and developing countries.
He has also developed other measurement and analysis tools including:
• The Basic Necessities Survey (BNS), a democratic and rights-based approach to the measurement of poverty, now widely used by international conservation NGOs.
• EvalC3, an Excel app, an integrated set of tools for developing, exploring and evaluating predictive models of expected outcomes.

Rick has published articles on evaluation issues in several specialist journals: Evaluation (UK), the American Journal of Evaluation, and Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal, and has carried out numerous peer reviews of papers submitted to these and other similar journals. He regularly makes presentations and runs training workshops for the UK Evaluation Society and European Evaluation Society annual and biannual conferences.

Rick has developed and managed the MandE NEWS website and associated email lists since 1997.