M&E Update: Measuring in Kenya & Ethiopia

2013 is a busy year for our Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) team at Nuru International. We are launching an M&E component into Ethiopia and we’ll be collecting impact data for our Agriculture, CED, Healthcare and Education programs in Kenya.

In Ethiopia, Kristin Lindell is one of our newest Fellows and has joined us to help develop out our M&E systems. With a background developing M&E systems at Global Brigades in Panama, Kristin’s first main task will be to train on and implement a Strengths and Needs Assessment to investigate deeply into the need of hunger in the community where we’ll be working. In addition, she’ll be training on and implementing Logic Model frameworks to provide our new programs with supports for program planning, project management, communication and monitoring and evaluation.  Another main task in Ethiopia will be the implementation of the Multidimensional Poverty Assessment Tool (MPAT) to gather a baseline level of poverty in the community.  We already started translating the MPAT into Amharic and Gamugna (the local mother tongue) with the help of some of our new counterparts in Ethiopia: Bereket Akele and Yohannes Ethiopia. The MPAT will also provide Nuru with key insights into the various components it measures; and it will be interesting to see how these components measure up against the scores at our project in Kenya.

In Kenya, Rogonga Augustine, Kelly Gannon and our M&E team are busy strengthening existing monitoring systems by working across programs to truly understand the ins and outs of each program area. The team has successfully worked with Healthcare (HC) to build a monitoring system that HC Field Officers (FOs) employ while at home visits.  The data we are retrieving includes information like:

• Number of home visits per FO per month
• Number of calls/SMS received and made per FO per month
• Number of pregnant women visited per FO per month
• Number of referrals given per FO per month
• Number of follow-ups made per FO per month
• Commodities sold per FO per month

In addition, we are implementing a Salesforce cloud-based customized database for data storage and reporting.  This has been a difficult process but we are hopeful for the upcoming launch at the end of the month!

In 2013, for Agriculture, we will continue to measure the yield of farmers for the 2013 maize long-rain season.  In addition to this, we are hoping to measure the occurrence of hunger seasons and how this changes over time for our farmers. For our CED program, we will continue to strengthen our systems for a  more thorough understanding of our impact.  Our M&E team is working with CED FOs to measure the percentage of CED members regularly tracking expenses and savings. For HC, we’ll follow up at the end of 2013, from our baseline we collected in 2012, to measure program metrics in accordance with HC’s goal toward the adoption and maintenance of identified healthy behaviors in order to improve maternal and child health. For Education, we gathered a baseline in January to measure the Standard 2 level literacy using the Uwezo tool among 4 intervention schools in Isebania division, 3 schools in Mabera division and 3 intervention schools in Mabera division. We’ll follow up at the end of the school year to determine impact for the Education program.

We are excited to report our data at the end of 2013 to demonstrate the potential impact of Nuru Kenya’s interventions.