I recently returned back to Kenya after a little break in the States – to see my husband, meet my new nephew and catch up with friends and family. When I returned my Kenyan colleagues asked me to tell stories of my adventures in America: how was my family, Obama, etc. I filled them in, …
I recently interviewed my counterpart, Rogonga Augustine, about his experience working for Nuru and his recent work with the MPAT. He’s featured on the right in the photo above, training enumerators to implement the MPAT survey. Hi Rogonga! Tell us a few things about yourself, such as your age, your favorite food and your favorite book. Sure. …
Cake Charts. I’m a little obsessed with cake charts this week. Ever heard of them? When I do a Google-image search for them, pie charts galore come up as well as photographs of really yummy looking cakes. Cake and pie charts have only one thing to do with one another: they are named after delectable …
The field work for the MPAT has been completed. It is amazing to say that! We conducted surveys in over 450 households in two of the sub-locations where we plan to scale in the fall. Alasdair is working on what will end up being a very thorough and interesting report of all the results, and …
One of the biggest challenges we’ve had with our CHWs is teaching them how to do an effective home visit. A myriad of things can, and do, make our CHW’s home visits ineffective, or at least not as effective as they should be:
The goal of Nuru’s Leadership Program is to empower local leaders to manage Nuru Kenya in a way that is both sustainable and scalable without Western support. Given this knowledge, we face an important and rather large question – is it even possible for local leaders who are primarily undereducated or informally educated – to …
As Gaby last wrote, we are well into carrying out the MPAT and only have about two weeks left of data collection. Our data entry is also underway with the three MPAT-recommended steps of checking, scoring and coding – that can be better understood by reading the MPAT User’s Guide. The three steps have been …
The CED program has had a busy long rain season. I mentioned when I first came on how excited I was to be here in such a wonderful season of growth, and I didn’t even understand how true that really was. We’ve launched four new initiatives, have added close to 530 new savers and will …
Our journey in Building Local Capacity to Construct Safe, Low Cost Latrines continues, and Nuru’s Water and Sanitation Program team members are having a lot of fun along the way. Who knew that compacting concrete could be so much fun? Since our friends from the Center for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology (CAWST) left, we …
The Education Team has successfully launched the outreach program in 6 schools throughout Nyametaburo and Nyangiti sub-locations. For the first few weeks, the outreach efforts consisted of reading hours – a program designed to stimulate listening comprehension, increase vocabulary, establish a love of reading and create an open environment in which the kids can explore …
In last week’s post, I mentioned that we actually have some MPAT data at this point, and we are working on figuring out how we will use the results. The title of the post was not that indicative of the information I presented unfortunately. I didn’t really get into how we are balancing program evaluation …
MPAT surveying has begun. Alasdair, Jamie, and Rogonga completed the two weeks of training and preparation that needed to occur prior to actual surveying in the community, and enumerators are busy going from household to household collecting data.
From the start, we knew that our success in reducing the under-five mortality rate in our area hinges on the community viewing Nuru’s CHWs as health experts and welcoming them into their homes. Unfortunately this had proven to be difficult. Initial reactions to the CHWs were lukewarm. Many households turned CHWs away.
Recently we made a decision that will have a big impact on the agriculture program and the model itself. Starting in 2011, we decided to issue input loans to farm maize only during the long rains season – not during both the long rains and short rains. This seems like a small statement and a …
The MPAT is in Kenya! We will soon hit the ground walking household-to-household with questions to give Nuru Kenya a baseline evaluation of two sublocations where we do not yet work. With 4 data entry specialists, 2 enumerator supervisors, and 12 enumerators out in the community, we are asking households in Kikurian questions such as …