All of the Sudden, We Have Program Metrics!

Does everyone know that? Well, we do. As you might have read here on this blog before, we are trying to accomplish the Monitoring and Evaluation of our work with two major types of metrics: Poverty Metrics and Program Metrics. Poverty Metrics are means by which we’re assessing the overall state of the communities where we work. We’re using the MPAT for that. We’ve already conducted a baseline MPAT in Kenya, and it went pretty darn well.

Program Metrics, on the other hand, are the means by which we are assessing the effectiveness of our interventions. These are very important and very tricky, actually. We are going to be dealing with difficult attribution challenges, survey design challenges, and evaluation challenges as we work with these program metrics over the years, but for now, we have decided what we want to use as tools to measure each and every intervention (other than our leadership interventions), and we have begun putting some of those tools to use!

David, Rogonga, and the rest of our field team have spent a great deal of time over the last few weeks designing a household survey and getting it going out in the field. As of right now, the team has conducted over 100 household surveys! This is so great and impressive. The survey looks very similar to the one we used with the MPAT, as does the data entry sheet. We will have a tremendous amount of data for Healthcare and WatSan within the next few weeks. This data will serve as a baseline against which we will measure progress in our programs as these two programs intervene in the baseline sublocations in the near future.

Leadership is the only program that is still in work. The program is doing great work, but we have yet to decide how to measure its effectiveness. Over time we will.

Education, Agriculture, and CED all have their program metrics designed and data has been gathered, but analysis has yet to happen for various reasons not really worth explaining here. …soon, I promise!

In other news, it is a busy time of year for Nuru. I just returned from a couple of days in California to meet with my colleagues on the Strategic Leadership Team. We made a couple of decisions about how to move forward with the structure of that team. It was a great success, but now the busy stuff happens. I am getting ready to have my Thanksgiving break, and I have more on my plate than I can complete before the break starts. Oh well, it’s time to move from the metaphorical plate to the physical one. I will catch up more next week.

Thanks for reading, and happy Thanksgiving!