This has been a very busy couple of weeks for us here on the M&E team. It’s fun, though, when there is a variety of work to do as opposed to one major piece of work to focus on and worry about. I like variety. I like switching from one thing to the next in a given day hour-by-hour.
The reason I now have some variety in MY work schedule is that I finally finished a draft of the M&E program history and submitted it to Jake. Whew! He wanted me to capture the history of our program for the last few years so that we could have down on paper the ups, downs, mistakes, lessons, successes and just the overall M&E processes, old and new. I submitted a draft and he’ll be reviewing it in the next couple of weeks so that we can get it to a state that is ready to put on record. Anyway, it’s good that I got that draft done. It was looming over my head for many months.
This week we finished another draft write-up: a case study for IFAD on the conduct of our MPAT that we did this spring. This case study will eventually be included in some of the MPAT literature that IFAD produces. It’s just about an 8-page description of us as an organization and how and why we used the MPAT. Not too difficult, and that project was done in collaboration between me and Jamie.
And in the more fun news department: I just returned to Ohio this morning from California! I was there for two days getting to know FT7 and training them on the current state of M&E at Nuru. It was really great to get to know them a little bit. The team will consist of four people new to Nuru: the Education, Agriculture, and M&E fellows and the team lead, and five Nuru veterans. The M&E fellow, as I have mentioned here on this blog, is David Brown. I am very excited that he is joining the team. He comes with a very interesting background. He also has a great understanding of where we are and everything we are trying to do in M&E.
Training this new team on that topic (where we are with M&E) was very satisfying and exciting. We’re in a really great place. It was fun to tell them about the MPAT and the final results of the MPAT baseline we conducted, and it was also fun to fill them in on where we are with program metrics. We’re already at a point where we have developed some draft survey tools and are implementing them in the field for a few of our programs (Healthcare, Agriculture, and Community Economic Development). We are piloting a great tool called Uwezo for the Education program to measure literacy levels of children, and we are finishing up the logic model for this program. For Leadership and Water & Sanitation, we are also in great shape working with the program managers to develop preliminary program metric plans as they solidify their models a little further.
I am excited about all the progress we are making!