Founded in 1999, the African Evaluation Association (AfrEA), brings together evaluation practitioners and commissioners across the African continent. With the Secretariat in Accra, Ghana, AfrEA serves as an umbrella body of more than 39 Voluntary Organizations for Professional Evaluation (VOPEs) in Africa, 12 institutional members and 81 individual members. AfrEA objectives are:

Supporting evaluations that contribute to real and sustained development in Africa.

Promoting Africa-rooted and Africa-led evaluation through sharing African evaluation perspectives.

Encouraging the development and documentation of high quality evaluation practice and theory.

Supporting the establishment and growth of Voluntary Organizations for Professional Evaluation (VOPEs)and special evaluation interest groups.

Facilitating capacity building, networking and sharing of evaluation theories, techniques and tools among evaluators, policymakers, researchers and development specialists.

Recognizing and embracing the diversity of African evaluation communities and integration of these communities across language barriers.

Regular international conferences, held in partnership with one of the national VOPEs, represent one of the core pillars of AfrEA operation. Since its establishment AfrEA has already conducted 9 such international conferences. These conferences provide a unique platform for networking, knowledge sharing and capacity development for members, funders, partners and other evaluation stakeholders. The conferences involve global actors but are focused particularly on Africa. For example, the previous 9th conference held in Cote devoire in 2019 attracted 682 participants from 60 countries and was supported by 35 partners.