Program Metrics, Pie Parties, and Personnel Changes

I couldn’t resist the opportunity for some alliteration. We have a lot going on, and I wanted to fill you in on all of it.

I’ll start with the last thing: personnel changes. Jamie Frederick is back here in the States getting ready to start working with us as a domestic staffer full-time. As you might know, her rotation in the field was as a Fellow, and fellows are not part of our full-time permanent staff. They are assigned to a temporary rotation in the field in Kenya. You can read more about that program here if you are interested.  The M&E team had a position that needed to be filled, and we interviewed Jamie for it, she was given an offer, and she accepted. We are very excited to have her join us a little more permanently. Jamie will be living and working in Santa Barbara, which will be a new adventure for her as she is a Midwest and East Coast gal. You’ll still be reading blog posts from her here.

David Brown has taken her place in the field. You’ve heard about him here as well. He is doing a bang-up job, which brings me, in a rather out-of-order way, to our first “P” above, Program Metrics. Rogonga, Jamie, and the rest of our Kenyan team have turned over to David a great foundation for our program metric work. With the work they’ve done as well as what David has put into it during the last few weeks that he has been there, we have a great draft of a household survey that includes questions for the Healthcare and WatSan Programs, a sampling frame for the conduct of this survey, and a training curriculum for the folks we’ll contract with to conduct the survey. We owe some gratitude to the MPAT and Alasdair for the expertise we have in-house to do this survey. We formatted the survey in an MPAT-like way and our training will take some of the things we learned and used with the MPAT. Which reminds me of another thing our amazing team has managed to do in Kenya – translate this survey into both Swahili and KiKurian. We will administer it within the next month or so, and I’ll report here on the results!

Our staff in Kenya has also made great progress on the program metrics for the other programs as well. Agriculture, CED, Education, and of course WatSan and Healthcare, all have draft program metrics written up, and as David puts it, they are ready to pause right now on iteration and refinement of the metrics themselves so that we can gather baseline data related to them in the near term. We have much of the data already for Agriculture and CED, it is just a matter of calculating score values and validating some of the data. Very exciting progress!

And now finally for that last “p” above – we are having a pie party here in Cincinnati to benefit Nuru next Friday! Billy Williams and his wife, as well as Jamie Frederick, will all be coming to the Queen City for us to celebrate and eat some scrumptious homemade pies. If you’re interested in coming, please do! It’s on Friday, October 28^th from 6 to 9 PM at Enzo’s OTR, which is at 1106 Race Street. It will be a blast.