Community of Evaluators (COE) in South Asia was constituted in October 2008. The community presently has 36 members from South Asian Countries namely Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The need for establishing the CoE stemmed from the experience that there are several evaluation practitioners / experts in the region, using a wide variety of approaches and techniques, each with its own set of strengths and limitations. There is currently no visible platform providing space for interaction and exchange to build knowledge in the region. As a result, there is limited reflection, convergence and research on evaluation taking place in the region. Also there is limited check or challenge to practices that need change and limited dissemination and adoption of good practices. Interaction and exchange of regional evaluators with international evaluation experts is also limited. When compared to international trends, there are not many exchange groups, platforms and evaluation associations in South Asia. Even the ones that exist are not very broad based and many practitioners are not members of such platforms.

In view of this situation and in order to advance the theory and practice of Evaluation in the South Asia region, the Community of Evaluators (CoE) was conceptualized and created. The community has begun to actively engage and work towards improving the quality of evaluation in South Asia.