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The Australian Government's prestigious Australia Awards programme offers scholarships to emerging leaders from the Indo-Pacific region to undertake full-time undergraduate or postgraduate study, or short-term fellowships and short courses. In order to monitor and evaluate the impact of these scholarships and fellowships, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) has designed the Australian Awards Global Tracer ...

The end of October 2016 marked the one-year anniversary of 'Measuring success?'. The blog series has been developed – or perhaps curated – without a strong editorial line. We have helped develop some themes in the blog, but have not guided the topics much beyond defining the basic parameter that posts had to be relevant to understanding the outcomes of scholarship programmes. In light of that, we felt that the ...

The scholarship programme and its objectives Over the period 2000 to 2006, The Atlantic Philanthropies (AP) funded The University of Queensland's Vietnam Coursework Masters and Doctoral Development Scholarship Programs, with grants totalling AUD 17 million. The primary objective of the programmes was: 'to contribute to the sustainable development of Vietnam through education and training initiatives that enhanced the knowledge, ...

International scholarships offer huge benefits to the sponsoring country; scholars are an important source of talent, skills, and diverse perspectives. Scholarships are also effective tools in promoting and enhancing a country's soft power, by investing in future leaders, providing access and equity to higher education, and increasing research excellence. However, beyond recognising an individual scholar's pure academic ...

Leadership is a nebulous term. It signifies all manner of different and often heavily context-dependent qualities – qualities which themselves are often ill-defined. Yet that doesn't seem to have stopped anybody from touting their expertise. Courses on leadership are springing up all over the world, attempting to do many different things – but united by a word which seems to stand for so much and so little at the same ...

This blog post follows on from a previous entry that discussed how a Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) methodology was used in the evaluation of the Sasol Inzalo Foundation's (SaIF) bursary programme in South Africa, where students were encouraged to record their experiences using self-quantified narratives. The benefits that students experienced as a result of contributing these self-quantified narratives ...

There have been scant studies initiated by global universities to follow-up on the career and life trajectories of their international alumni. While such studies are regularly conducted for domestic graduates, and provide an important basis for recruitment and private or government support, campuses typically lack the institutional research support or mandate to conduct such systematic studies about international graduates. ...

'A transformative experience for me and my community'.  These are words I often hear when speaking to alumni of the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program (IFP), a programme for 4,305 emerging social justice leaders from marginalised communities in 22 countries, which ran from 2001 - 2013. But how can we transfer these individual stories to measure the success of a global social change ...

'Even a spoonful of narrative is worth more than oceans of opinion' - Cynthia Kurtz (2014) This blog post will discuss how a Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI) approach was used in the evaluation of the Sasol Inzalo Foundation's bursary programme in South Africa. As part of the evaluation process, students were encouraged to record their experiences using self-quantified narratives, with the aim of ...

One would expect and wish for a direct link between evaluation studies and policymaking. In an ideal world, policy making is influenced by the outcomes of evaluation studies, and evaluation studies are designed to improve and inform policy decisions. In practice, this is not always the case. In many instances policies are determined by politics and interests rather than insights gathered from evidence, and ...