 I want to thank Steffi for that very nice warm introduction. I'm very happy to be a part of the new updated improved If Death and truly hope that it goes on and continues for many, many years, at least 17 more, if not more. It's in good hands and I feel very good about its placement and its feeding in care with Wolfgang, with Steffi and the rest of the crew. So I have a few remarks and hopefully won't keep you that long from the festivities. So master's ceremonies, distinguished members of the IPDET consortium, the University of Bern, the Center for Evaluation, CVAL, and the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank, and most importantly you, the IPDET soon-to-be graduates, a good evening. So I've talked about, thought about this presentation in terms of both looking back and moving forward and I think that's sort of an appropriate role for me at this stage. So 20 years ago I was sitting with Bob Pichioto, whom some of you may know. Bob is well into his 80s and he is still active in evaluation. Any of you that are on the EVAL list, EVAL talk listserv know that Bob is alive and well and actively following and participating in many conversations. So 20 years ago I was sitting with Bob, who was then Director-General Evaluation for the World Bank Group and I had left the evaluation group for a brief stint in the World Bank Institute. It was the only non-evaluation job I had held in umpteen years and I needed to get back into evaluation so I was returning to IEG and Bob and I were sitting together and he said, so what do you want to do? And 20 years ago I said, well, Bob, you're always talking about needing a world-class training program in development evaluation and I'd like to try to achieve that. And he said, okay, that sounds good, but we can't be demand or supply pushed. We have to be seen and viewed and truly be pushed by demand. So in 1999, that's a long time ago, I got a little bit of money for a consultant and crafted a survey to find out what was out there in the way of training programs, especially those focused on development. And at that time there were a few master's degree programs and a lot of sort of one-off sporadic courses that were short-term. And one longer program, I think it was a six-week program at East Anglia, University of East Anglia. And nothing that was recurring and more short-term and not one-off and sort of a longer period of time but not six weeks. We knew people wouldn't, in our world, wouldn't be able to come for six weeks. So we were presenting these findings and got a go signal and that's when Ray Rist, my good colleague, joined the effort. Together we crafted sort of the design of IPDED, of the core cores and the workshops and found a host institution and we were sort of off and running. I say sort of because I think it was in about May, early May of that year planning to hold the first IPDET in June. And we were sitting down together, both Ray and I, with Bob again. And Bob asked us how the applications were going and we sort of said, well, you know, scholarships or, you know, paying participants. And he said, well, paying participants. And I was a little scared because in those days Bob was known not only for his brilliance but he also had a fearsome temper at times and I had to tell him, well, 13. But, you know, we hear that people in the development banks don't apply until the registration date has passed. You know, we've been assured there was this dead silence. And then Bob started laughing and laughed and we knew it would be all right. And it was all right. We started that first year, I think, with 56 people in the core. Yeah. And many of that original cohort have gone on to very illustrious careers. And it was an eventful year. So we were okay. Now, just to give you one more illustration of Bob, he used to foster productivity by example. So he was famous for sending emails at 1.30 or 2 a.m. And if you walked in the office at 9 o'clock and you hadn't responded yet, it was like he was disappointed. He disappointed him. I know we don't usually manage like that anymore but it was, that was Bob's legend at the time. So I could tell stories all day of those early years. But I want to talk about evaluation and I want to use this opportunity to talk about evaluation professionalism. And what do we mean by professionalism? It's a term that gets thrown around a lot but what do we mean by it? Well, a profession requires acquisition and application of a body of knowledge, technical skills and dispositions. The individuals in a profession are bound together by shared commitment and members of the profession regulate themselves. The extent to which these characteristics are obtained and demonstrated is the extent of professionalism. We can think of the concept simply as professional identity. I will discuss briefly first how IPDET has contributed and is contributing to professionalism and development evaluation. Second, the growth of evaluation. And third, the major challenges facing evaluation professionalism today. And lastly, and all this is briefly, a new idea. So IPDET has never been just another training program and evaluation. Clearly, it's about increasing participants' knowledge and skills in designing and conducting evaluations of development programs. And as professional practice evolves, the knowledge and skills IPDET offers also evolve. But IPDET has always also been about building a community with a shared commitment to development evaluation and I think this is essential to building professionalism. IPDET accomplishes this by bringing together people from around the globe who are engaged in development evaluation. It fosters a sense of community within the classroom and special events from receptions and guest speakers to evening soccer games and weekend activities. But most importantly, IPDET doesn't end when the program is over. As some of you returning IPDETters know, the IPDET listserv is meant to foster a global community of learners and you will now join that community. Over 3,000 IPDET professors and faculty are connected at any point in time on that IPDET listserv. And it should serve not only as a means of announcing employment opportunities for IPDET grads, but also a forum for shared problem solving and discussions and disseminating major evaluation reports that may be of wide interest and announcing upcoming events that may be of interest. Participants also stay connected to IPDET on Facebook, Twitter and even YouTube and those have been interesting developments. Some IPDET cohorts have set up their own Facebook networks. Some of the, like we have the class of this in 2015, has its own Facebook network, which is pretty cool. So over 5,000 people now have attended some form of IPDET and they speak the same language of evaluation. Whether they are evaluators, those who manage evaluators, auditors, researchers or monitoring and evaluation specialists. You now have cousins, we say, you have cousins all over the world and when you travel, you can always ask on the listserv for those who may be in the same area and want to get together and that's really valuable when you're going into a country that's new to you. IPDET's last independent impact evaluation credited the program and I will proudly quote as not only unparalleled in its ability to acquire foundational knowledge in skill and development evaluation, but also in helping to build local capacity and demand for development evaluation end of quote. End quote in the efforts of alumni who are championing M&E end of quote. And I hope that you will join the ranks of those who are champions of evaluation. The growth of evaluation over the past 20 years has been tremendous. I think that in 1999, there were 15 evaluation associations and some of those were struggling. Today at last report in 2009, there were 145 and 103 countries represented in those 145. It's just huge growth in 20 years. Not all of these are flourishing. You know, some need help, it's easier to start them than to keep them going. But this is huge, huge progress. Just some examples of regional evaluation associations which are flourishing, right? We have the Middle East and North Africa Evaluation Network on their fourth annual meeting. Asia has the community of evaluators. South Asia, the Asian Pacific Evaluation Association and Asia Evaluation Week sponsored by the Asian Development Bank mainly. On the demand side, in South Asia, we have the parliamentarians forum which has really taken off internationally, which is a wonderful thing to get those and legislative bodies interested because they can be the true demand side for evaluation. And growing their knowledge about evaluation and how to use evaluation reports is just so important. It's a wonderful development. Now, the global parliamentarians forum for evaluation is alive and well and sparking all kinds of spin-off efforts. Today, the American Evaluation Association, I have a hard time believing this, it has 7,300 members. It's programmed for its annual meetings or the size of the old-fashioned telephone books which you may or may not recall. And indeed, I think they claim 800 of those members internationally. We also have IDIS, which is the International Development Evaluation Society which website reports that it has 700 members. So it's gotten to the point where VowTalk, the AEA's chatroom, had a recent discussion topic that went on for weeks about the oversaturation of evaluation consultants in the U.S. and its effects. And it's unheard of to even begin to think that you would have that kind of conversation. But, you know, what has happened is really growth, you know, before we were proud of our North-South efforts and then we had a couple showcase South-North efforts and, you know, now it's quite common to have South-South. The dream for many years as in the Paris Declaration was to get to the point where you didn't need all those external consultants coming from developed countries to do evaluations, that there would be enough local capacity so that each country could produce their own evaluations. And I think we're getting to the point we're certainly moving forward at a rapid pace in there being good or decent evaluation capacity. We need more, absolutely. Need to do more, absolutely. But we can now say we certainly have evaluation experts in almost every country. Along with the growth of voluntary organizations for professional evaluation have come ethical guidelines and competency frameworks for evaluation. The frameworks developed by Ideas and the UK Evaluation Society are notable for developing competencies not only for those who directly conduct evaluations but also for those who manage evaluations and those who just commission them. The United Nations Evaluation Group has developed and revised competencies for all evaluators working in the UN system. And of course we have Canada's credentialed evaluator designation system which has been operating since 2010. And we have voluntary evaluator peer review professionalization initiatives which have been undergoing under the European Evaluation Society in the UK. So long gone are the days when those from developing countries who graduated from IPDEP would almost automatically be promoted to head monitoring and evaluation units. Because they were the experts in the country those days are gone. In 2015 the UN endorsed year of evaluation a historic gathering in Nepal as most of you probably know brought together eminent evaluators, senior officials, academics, volunteers and civil society representatives to endorse a vision outlined in the global evaluation agenda 2016-2020. That vision among other things is a world where evaluation receives due recognition as a profession. Therein lies the problem. As those of you who are evaluators likely know evaluation is just not widely recognized as a profession. And it lacks still the requisites that I started off with. A profession requires acquisition and application of a body of knowledge, technical skills and dispositions. Agreement doesn't yet exist on a body of knowledge, technical skills and dispositions for evaluators. And there's no regulation against therefore set of professional standards. The stated intent of the evaluators that each voluntary organization and a professional evaluation define for itself what professionalism means. A sort of let a lot of flowers grow. And this effort has been tremendously successful in growing many evaluation organizations. But in my own opinion it advances diversity of approaches of competency systems of frameworks. And I think that that is an issue in what we're, how we're currently acting. I think that professionalism should provide a professional identity that can be recognized formally, distinguished from other professionals who engage in different types of assessments such as auditors. And that communicates well to stakeholders and the public, especially on the added value that evaluation can provide. Having to meet professional standards and competency requirements reduces the risk that as now anybody can call themselves an evaluator and do evaluation. They don't have to come to IPDA, they don't have to have any training. And that's the situation today. So other knowledge disciplines have achieved in sustained their professional status in part by setting up international institutes or academies mandated to promote broad-based public understanding of the discipline, foster its development and encourage its use in decision-making. We have the prestigious International Academy of Science with 119 Nobel Laureates, the International Statistics Institute, the International Federation of Accountants, International Academy of Engineering, International Academy of Mediators, and I could go on and on. There's no international academy for evaluation of any kind. So these academies generally have in common a mission to foster high standards, promote study and understanding, educate public legislative bodies on use, encourage research and innovation, and develop and support new approaches, and also promote cooperation among countries and foster sometimes collaborative interdisciplinary research in state-of-the-art methodologies and technologies. Most of these organizations also undertake a formal or informal consultation role, often with United Nations bodies, with different bodies. So as someone who set out to create a world-class evaluation training program and development evaluation, I do not shy away from large, seemingly impossible tasks. So I am helping with ideas to advance discussion on the concept of International Evaluation Academy being started, and Bob P. Chioto is also backing this idea. Thank you, thank you. I may be Don Quixote tilting at the windmill, but I'll probably continue. So we're trying to do this, we're proposing to do this hand-in-hand with the International Organization for Cooperation and Evaluation, which some of you know as IOCE, and I think it's very important that this go forward as a partnership, as that's the body in which countries and country organizations are represented. So I think it's necessary to have that partnership. So the Academy's mission would be to contribute to transforming the enabling environment for evaluation, strengthening institutional capacities, and upgrading evaluators capacities through professionalization. It would promote broad-based public understanding of the discipline of evaluation, foster its development, and encourage its use in decision-making. At its core would be nominated and elected fellows. There would likely be an annual or biannual nominations process by National and Regional Evaluation Associations, and as well as other partner organizations who might help out this initiative. There would need to be followed by an established peer-review process and final selections. But the objective would be to bring together those who made strong contributions to the evaluation community from the worlds of evaluation practitioners, academia, and societies to promote evaluation within and across borders. The first thing all of you will think is probably, oh, sounds good, but how do we ensure diversity? How do we make sure this doesn't result in elitism? And we're very conscious of that. And I think procedures would have to be set in place, again, to make sure that countries are represented. There are lots of issues in trying to develop this concept, lots and lots of issues. And we have a concept paper, but it sets out the concept, just the concept. We hope that Ideas has a global assembly in Prague at the beginning of October. Workshops are the end of September. The actual program begins October 1st. As part of the pre-activities, we're going to have a workshop on this concept and try to have groups that try to flesh out some of the ideas and work out how something like this might be organized. The concept, no, intentionally does not try to define that. So I hope maybe I will see some of you in Prague and maybe you will join me in my donkey-honey quest. So I need to conclude. I want to say there is so much to be proud about in the growth of evaluation, development evaluation in particular, and the sustaining of if-death in its new home. It's all terrific. But I think that many are frustrated by evaluation not being a recognized profession. So I'm happy to share the concept note for the academy. Just drop me a line at lindigee1000 at gmail.com and hope I see some of you in Prague. But it is time to celebrate you, the if-death class or soon-to-be class of 2019. Time to begin. So I congratulate you and very warmly welcome you into the if-death community. So thank you. Thank you.