During my Blog-Writing Break, we Gathered a lot of Data!

Well, it has been a while. My team and I were working on trying to develop a more solid perspective on what the purpose of writing these posts is, how frequently we should write them, and what the nature of them should be. I think we have come up with a few good ideas, but it will take a couple of posts for us to completely incorporate them. In the meantime, I thought I should give a quick update as to what is happening with all of our data gathering at the moment. In the future, we are hoping these posts will be a little more exciting and dynamic — more photos, a little more thematic, a little more regularity in terms of what we introduce.

This will be one of the things I leave to Jamie in my absence, though, as I am heading out on maternity leave towards the end of December. Yep, I am nearing the end of a pregnancy. It seems to be taking a very long time, but I guess this is how long it takes normally. This is my first one, so I am learning something new every day. In my absence Jamie will be stepping up as the interim M&E Director. I know she will do a bang-up job. The hard part will just be prioritizing for her. She is very busy as it is, and she will have a few new things on her plate in this bigger role. She and I will work together to prepare for this in the next two months.

Alright, here is a quick update on data for all of our programs:

Agriculture

We finished a full comprehensive impact study this year. This entailed gathering baseline data back in the spring to determine what the starting point for yield for the Nuru farmers with whom we would work was and gathering impact data in the last month or so to determine their new yields after our intervention. We found great news about the impact of our intervention which we will report soon (and can report now to anyone who requests it), but I think the thing the M&E team was most excited about was that we successfully conducted the study. It was a good process and we learned a lot.

We have gathered some other data for Agriculture too in recent weeks related to income. This stuff is a little more complicated so I will not get into it here, but it was another good study.

CED

The biggest task we have been engaging in related to this program has just been working with the folks who are building our database to ensure their tool meets the needs of the CED program. It is complex as the program itself is intensely improving the way it handles all of its data right now. Much more on this later , but we are moving well down a hard path with this program.

Education

Another impact study down! We got baseline literacy data from the schools at the start of this year, and we have gathered literacy data from the schools again recently, after about one year of Nuru work. We have yet to analyze the data, so I don’t know the nature of the news, but we are very excited to have, again, conducted a good study with good data and a 100% sample.

Healthcare

We have at this point gathered perhaps all of the baseline data we plan to gather for this program. It is a lot of data. Kelly and I were just talking today and she told me she was looking at a stack of over 700 household surveys. We are working on analyzing the final chunk of surveys we just gathered, and we will report on them shortly. The more important question we’re still working on answering is how frequently and whom we will be testing in the future to most appropriately determine impact. It might seem like a simple question, but there are a bunch of factors we are trying to take into account that, again, I don’t want to get into here, but we will discuss here in the future!

Leadership

And finally, Leadership. We have nailed down our list of indicators for this program, and we are working on a couple of things. One is sharing said list with the rest of our staff. The other is going ahead and implementing the use of these indicators. Much more on this one later, but for now, we are excited to know what we want to measure for this program.

So, a lot of progress! We are happy with where we are.