The 9th Biennial South African Monitoring and Evaluation Association (SAMEA) Conference, whose theme was “Vuca-Vuka! Catalyzing Change Through Monitoring and Evaluation,” took place at the Birchwood Hotel in Johannesburg from October 7-11, 2024. SAMEA had a whopping 600 attendees this year – an exponential jump from the first conference in 2005, which had about 50 attendees. Several Khulisa evaluators attended SAMEA 2024, as did Khulisa co-founder and former Director Jennifer Bisgard, who was SAMEA’s founding chair 19 years ago.
In addition to being the largest SAMEA conference in history, and the first conference ever to sell out, Jen noted that SAMEA 2024 was also the smoothest, most informative, and most well-run SAMEA conference yet. “[The conference has] just gone exponentially better,” in recent years, Jen said. “People were presenting very directly. They were keeping to time. They were making relevant points. The audience was very engaged, instead of doing stuff on their computers or on their phones…The keynote speakers were really on point and just made some splendid presentations. They were really superb and people stayed until the very end.”
We asked Jen to name her top tip for people considering attending SAMEA or a similar conference in the M&E field. Her answer was simple: “You do have to go to these conferences. Face-to-face is so much better than being online, and being willing to go up and engage with strangers…You gain something on the edge of your network that you just don’t get if you’re only engaging with the people inside your network.”
We thought this simple tip is extremely relevant, especially in the post-COVID age when so many meetings are still happening virtually. To learn more about the SAMEA conference and related events, follow SAMEA on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn.