Program Indicator Update — How We are Measuring the Effectiveness of our Interventions

If you spend any time around these blog-parts (sounds gross), you have might been exposed to the fact that we have characterized our current set of operational programs that are up and running in Kenya three ways:

• We have two sustainability programs, and those are the Leadership Program and IGA
• R&D and M&E are support programs
• Healthcare, Education, CED and Agriculture are all impact programs

Our current thinking is that we, the M&E team, will use logic models to define and ultimately program indicators to measure the impact of all four of our impact programs and the Leadership program. We think that IGA’s measure of success will be profitability, and that R&D’s measure of success will be the development and implementation of new products or processes that are solutions to problems we have. Our measure of success is kind of binary — are we able to gather data effectively and correctly and report on programs’ progress or not? I say kind of because, as with many things, there are of course degrees of effectiveness and correctness within-which we could accomplish or not accomplish our goals.

Here is a quick report on where we are with the five programs with which we are working:

• We have been working very closely with Agriculture in recent months. Teaming with them, we have refined their means of collecting baseline yield data, and are currently conducting baseline surveys with farmers in new sub-locations where Nuru will soon be working. We will gather impact data with the harvest in a couple of months. This is a great development for our team as we have not worked closely with Ag in the past because we have been too occupied with other things. We are excited about the current state of our work together.
• CED is a program we still need to tackle. During the current transition activities, the field M&E team has met with the field CED team to get started on turning over M&E of this program from the program itself to M&E. We expect to make some progress here in the next couple of months.
• As I have reported here before, we have some great baseline data for Education having used the Uwezo tool early this year in a number of schools where Nuru is working. We will conduct another assessment with it at the end of the year/early next year. There are a couple of other indicators besides the literacy one (which is what Uwezo tests) that the Education program wants to track. We need to work with them to develop evaluation and data collection plans for those indicators.
• Healthcare has been on Jamie’s and my minds and plates a lot lately, and the good news is that it has been pretty fun! Rogonga and the M&E team in the field gathered baseline data for a couple of sub-locations late last year, and David analyzed it early this year. Jamie and I did some additional analysis, and HC has a good baseline. Jamie has recently been updating the survey we used with some lessons we learned from that experience, and we are ready to roll a new one out shortly. We have baseline values for almost all of Healthcare’s indicators.
• Jamie, Chelsea, and Thomas have been writing and refining the Leadership logic model over recent months, and we are comfortable with the list of indicators they have arrived at at this point. The next step is to do evaluation plans for each of them. Jamie is collaborating with them to make this happen.

That is all! I just wanted to report to all of you about where we are with the programs. We are constantly making progress, and sometimes I am struck by how much further along we are with these things than we were a mere year ago. It is great.