Indigenous community members should be empowered to ask critical questions of evaluators, and evaluators should be prepared to answer them. This guide provides a series of questions Indigenous community members may wish to ask evaluators before agreeing to research projects.
International development can involve outsiders interacting with Indigenous communities. Indigenous community members are not always approached as peers, with their own knowledge to exchange in return for the knowledge provided by external evaluators. This resource suggest 10 questions Indigenous communities may want answered before agreeing to external evaluations:
- Who do you know in this community?
- What do you know about this community?
- Where are you from?
- Do you speak our language?
- What do you know about the history of the initiative?
- What relationship will you have with us during the evaluation?
- Will people in our community get work in the evaluation?
- Will we have a say in the design of the evaluation?
- Who will be analyzing the evaluation findings and writing the report?
- How will you support our use of the evaluation findings?
Each question is accompanied by a series of sub-questions.
Evaluators may wish to review these questions during the design of their research projects to prepare for respectful and equitable interactions with Indigenous communities.