Demystifying the Black Box of OBF in India

The document summarises deliberations at the 2025 Evaluation Conclave 2025 (Colombo), co‑hosted by Indian School of Development Management (ISDM) and GRAAM. It explores how evaluation systems in development practice must be grounded in local contexts while remaining methodologically robust, highlighting the need for participatory evaluation, stakeholder‑ownership, context‑sensitive methods, and capacity building of evaluators and communities. It calls for institutionalising evaluation as a discipline, strengthening evaluator skills, and aligning evaluation use with policy and community needs, to ensure evaluations are meaningful, inclusive, and relevant to lived realities.