Creating Space for Children’s Participation: Planning with Street Children in Yangon, Myanmar

Summary

Participatory evaluations have been undertaken and described in a variety of ways, including Participatory Action Research and Empowerment Evaluation. The latter approach was explicitly mentioned in the Terms of Reference for this evaluation and is
commonly mentioned in all WVA (World Vision Australia) auspiced evaluations. Empowerment Evaluation is designed to assist program participants to develop their capacity to evaluate and improve their own programs (Fetterman et al., 1996). It was with these thoughts in mind that, in April of this year, with assistance from World Vision
Australia (WVA), World Vision Myanmar (WVM) conducted a two-week ‘empowerment’ evaluation of their Street Children & Working Children (SWC) Program. Consistent with the main aim of Empowerment Evaluation, the key objective of this evaluation was to provide capacity for the project participants (especially the ‘users’ or ‘beneficiaries’
– the children) to evaluate and be involved with project decision making.