Learning through evaluation - a case study on organizational learning within the non-governmental organization UYDEL (Uganda Youth Development Link) in Kampala, Uganda

Sammanfattning: In a globalized social welfare market, where international and national NGOs influence social service delivery in community’s worldwide, the demands on mutual exchange, shared responsibilities, and transnational collaborations has increased. However, there are some challenges that NGOs face in this work. Lack in coordination of donor funded projects have enabled overlapping responsibility in service provision and a rivalry between NGOs in retrieving funds, witch in it turn has hindered the communication of knowledge between NGOs in the social work field. To create good practice, the basic assumption is that NGOs have to be able to learn from past experiences, a process known as organizational learning. One way of realizing organizational learning, is through evaluation. The success of an evaluation is further closely linked with the utilization of the knowledge gained. The purpose of this study is to discover how knowledge gained through an evaluation made by the Swedish organization IOGT-NTO, has been used within the non-governmental organization of UYDEL, and how this knowledge is communicated to the organizations stakeholders. To realize our purpose, we conducted a field study within UYDEL in Kampala, Uganda. The material, collected through interviews and observations, was later transcribed and analyzed, in relation to our theoretical framework. The theoretical framework includes basic theories on organizational learning, evaluation and communication. Our results indicate that issues that initially introduced themselves in this evaluation, later was reintroduced in our material, and thus still remained a problem within UYDEL. What seemed to hinder organizational learning was the organizations over-dependency on its donors, which affected its sustainability, and could be seen as a consequence of the misplacement of recourses within the organization.