Description
The Department of Economic Development (DED) contracted Umhlaba Development Services (UDS) to conduct an evaluation of eight selected projects that the DED funded in the 2006/07 financial year. Six projects were identified for evaluation from the Integrated Business Development Services programme and three projects from
the Trade and Industry Development programme. A requirement was that the projects should have been in existence for more than 18 months, hence increasing the likelihood that the projects would have sufficient progress to enable useful evaluation.
Although nine projects were selected, the service providers were unable to access data for one of the Trade and Industry development projects; hence only eight individual project evaluations were completed1.
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This composite evaluation report draws out patterns and themes across the individual project evaluations and provides analysis and recommendations to the DED related to the issues identified.
Purpose of Evaluations Key questions in the conducting of these evaluations have been:
• To what extent is the DED achieving its objectives through each project?
• To what extent is the DED conducting its business in an efficient, effective
and sustainable manner?
The evaluations are intended to enable learning from what is happening in the projects and to extract the lessons to inform future practice.
