Evaluations of the Botswana National Literacy Program (BNLP) are reviewed, with emphasis on one internal and one external evaluation. The BNLP may be one of the most extensively evaluated national literacy programs ever conducted, with a program staff intensively trained in evaluation. One lesson of the repeated evaluations of the BNLP is that a point comes when evaluation may use resources needed for program implementation. Evaluation cannot be fully exorcised of politics; however, the political ramifications must at least be clarified and the worst political encroachments resisted. Internal evaluations seemed to serve program implementation better and demonstrated the usefulness of the Action Training Model. The need to intervene and control partly explained when and why the various evaluations were commissioned and what use was made of evaluation results. (SLD)