Balancing Program Evaluation and the State of the Community

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.

Nuru program staff members suggested a couple of extra questions specifically related to their programs, and these questions have been refined and added to the survey that’s being conducted. Examples of the extra data we’re trying to gather are last season’s maize yield for our Agriculture Program and the number of children under five who live in a household for our Healthcare Program. The refinement of these questions included the creation of some codified response-choices for them so that they are MPAT-like.

As a reminder, we will end up with something like this as a picture of the state of the enabling environment in the fifteen villages in the two sub-locations where we’re conducting the MPAT:

The responses to the questions that we added to our survey will not contribute to the calculation of the ten scores above. The math of the MPAT for us will be the same as the standard math that was created for the tool in the first place. The extra responses we have will just be information that we choose to use (at the program level), however we wish.

Now that all this data is actually being gathered, and even, at the time of the writing of this post, entered into excel spreadsheets, we are beginning to think about how we will use it. One thing we plan on doing is coming up with Exit Criteria for our western staff using the MPAT. This will include a critical view of the results of the conduct of this baseline survey as well as an assessment of what we think is the ideal state of the enabling environment in the community. We will work on developing a perspective on this this summer.

Until next week, thanks for reading!