During all of December and January, Nuru Agriculture is distributing loans of agriculture inputs (fertilizer and seed) for maize production to approximately 3,000 smallholder farmers in Kuria, Kenya. Nuru Agriculture provides agricultural loans as one critical element of its complete farmer package, which includes technical trainings, organization of farmers into small work groups, and agriculture …
Click here to read this post in the New York Times. These days, I spend most of my time hiking the rolling hills and valleys of Kuria, a remote district in rural Kenya. I’m on a very different career path now than I was before, as a Marine patrolling streets and alleys in Iraq. In …
The M&E team had a pow-wow with the Education team last night. We discussed a couple of the issues I mentioned in my last post, and how we should most appropriately react to them. We have a couple of ideas, but none of them are set in stone. One simple thing we might do the next time we …
We have been focusing on co-creation over the last two rotations. Co-creation was always a core part of what we wanted in the development of the Nuru model, but we have become more intentional in seeking to ensure that is truly how we are acting and developing our program models. Msingi wa KAPESA (MwaK), CED’s …
Last week I gave you a quick update on what we have been doing related to Program Metrics. I would like to brag about how we have been analyzing the data we have already gathered. David and Rogonga have been doing some hard-core analysis of all of the data we gathered for Healthcare and Watsan …
I wanted to give an update on our program metrics in this blog post as it has been a hot issue on our team lately. I had a call with one of our biggest donors this week about this topic, David is hard at work in the field on all sorts of Program Metric-related activities, …
The end of 2011 brought a lot of new changes to the Education program. We doubled the number of students attending our Learning Resource Center, we launched a mobile version of the Learning Resource Center, and we piloted a new student progress tracking system. In 2012, the Education program has launched its first Mobile Library …
Happy New Year everyone! When I arrived in September 2011, the Healthcare Program staff were functioning as trainers and supervisors for a cadre of government recognized Community Health Workers. As our team observed, we saw this approach was ineffective for reasons including; CHWs unmotivated to perform basic job duties (including home visiting and attending trainings), …
Returning from Kenya in November last year, I’m back in the US working to provide insight and strategy on Monitoring & Evaluation systems in Kenya and soon to be Ethiopia. Living in sunny Santa Barbara, I have the luxury of being able to visit the Ellwood Monarch Butterfly Preserve which is the overwintering site of …
However informative training is, it always leaves me (and I think all my Nuru colleagues) feeling like we sure do have a lot of work to do. I am down in Southern California after three days up in the Bay Area where I attended a training session organized by Lindsay Cope and attended by a …
On New Year’s Eve this year, I found myself on the beach in San Clemente watching yet another beautiful sunset in SoCal – man I love this place! While I sat there, I tracked the final hours of the 2011 Holiday Campaign with my phone. As donations continued to trickle in and it became evident that …
This was a definitive year for the Community Economic Development (CED) Program. The model has progressed tremendously, we are collecting data on our program metrics in order to determine impact and put together a financial model that shows sustainability of the program. The Kenyan staff is increasingly taking ownership of the program, conducting needs analysis …
So the WatSan team has been in full marketing mode for the past several weeks. We’ve been conducting trainings in our villages in which we show our videos on sanitation and hygiene while performing role plays that discuss issues that families face in deciding whether or not to purchase a latrine. We learned a lot …
What a busy and exciting month it has been. Full of a beautiful sort of chaos and a slew of new endeavors. When school is in session here in Kuria (the cycle runs with three months on and one month off, so the children go to school January, February, March, and then get April off, …
What a great title for a TV show. Seriously. I can’t believe that flew, but I’m so happy that it did. I like thinking of it un-ironically (yes, you “irony” sticklers, I do definitely tend to use that word incorrectly) or un-rhetorically. Like, it’s a real question: What IS happening now? That is how I …