A cross-cultural comparison of campus-community partnerships to build evaluation capacity in rural Pennsylvania and urban Cairo

In recent years funders have increasingly demanded that community programs demonstrate the effectiveness of their interventions through evaluation. Many community-based organizations have difficulty meeting this demand because they lack the necessary training and resources. This difficulty provides universities with an excellent opportunity to partner with community-based organizations by assisting them in building evaluation capacity. This paper describes evaluation capacity-building initiatives that were developed through partnerships between a university and a community collaborative board in a rural area of the United States and between a university and urban non-governmental organizations in Cairo, Egypt. Cultural factors in each setting that impacted the implementation of these initiatives are examined. These factors included communication and interpersonal norms, collaboration, accountability, social integration, role flexibility and openness to new approaches, political and economic factors, and commitment to evaluation capacity building.