Short Abstract

How can creative user-centred participatory methods with young people change how we evaluate? This session shares how child-led photovoice and drawings in Ghana, Mali, and Senegal is transforming evidence into empathy, strengthening learning cultures, and reshaping what counts as credible knowledge.

Description

What happens when young people become evaluators of their own wellbeing and learning? This presentation explores how Right To Play’s child-led creative method initiatives in Ghana, Mali, and Senegal are transforming evaluation and evidence generation from a technical process into a human, participatory act of reflection and change.

Contributing to the Conference theme “Building Evaluation Cultures” the session will also look at how embedding participatory user-centred methods within organisational MEL systems can turn evidence into action and humanise complex social issues to foster real-time programme learning in both stable and fragile contexts.

Across three countries, children and youth were trained to use photography and drawings to capture what education, work, safety, and rights mean in their communities. Their photos and stories revealed striking realities from child labour and gender barriers to resilience and hope while also prompting adults to see their world differently.

In Ghana, children photographed daily life, capturing the fine line between helpful chores and harmful work. As one child said, “Helping your parents is good, but not when it makes you tired or miss school.” In Mali, adolescents used imagery and drawings to document gendered barriers to schooling and protection. In Senegal, youth explored child mobility, migration, and belonging through their lenses with the aid of photography. Together, these voices created powerful visual evidence that was analysed collaboratively and used to inform programming and advocacy. The photos and drawings became advocacy tools in community dialogues; shifted the balance of power, giving children the space to speak for themselves through their own lenses. Programmes are being adapted in real time: in Ghana, photovoice findings led to programme adaptations such as livelihood support for families and peer-led child protection clubs; in Mali, community exhibitions inspired educators and parents to take action to address school absenteeism and early work; in Senegal, youth-created imagery were used through youth-led exhibitions to engage policymakers on safe migration, reintegration, and aspirations for change.

This presentation contributes to evaluative practice in these ways:

1) Institutionalising user-led evaluation: Demonstrating how creative participatory approaches can be embedded within MEL systems to inform programme design, adaptation, and learning cycles.

2) Co-creating evidence to strengthen accountability, trust and learning: Showing how participatory evidence builds transparency, responsiveness, and shared ownership between communities, implementers, and policymakers.

3) Humanising complex issues: Using visual narratives to surface the moral and emotional dimensions of phenomena like child labour, gender inequity, and migration turn images into catalysts for empathy and change.

4) Navigating ethical nuances: Reflecting critically on consent, representation, and power dynamics in child-led evaluation, including how facilitators balanced empowerment with protection.

The case studies collectively reveal how evaluation, when reframed as a participatory and relational process, can strengthen both accountability and empathy. They illustrate how seeing through the eyes of intended populations such as young people transform not only what is known, but how knowledge is used. Ultimately, this work calls for evaluation cultures that move beyond compliance toward systems where learning is shared, evidence is lived, and every voice has power.