This is a guestblog by Crosbond Boera Moseti. Research assistant on the M&E 2.0 pilot and student at Multimedia University College of Kenia.
Hey! Howdy there? Hope everyone is well. Fantastic!
Just a bite to chew on here: Would 1%CLUB partners in Kenya be able to measure the effectiveness and the in-depth performance of their projects? Well they would, but (here is the catch) not only in a M&E 1.0 kind of way. This is a rather bureaucratic and top down approach of gathering and collecting data. Project managers would be the ones who lead the project team in the fact-finding mission, supported by the project team and expensive external experts.
Accountability to the donor wouldn’t be guaranteed though. In terms of venues of disseminating this information or the tools used, you would find that there was a rather hard way of relaying the data or providing a singular source of info. So much about the disadvantages of the M&E 1.0. It expresses the need for a dynamic more advanced and user friendly way of finding these facts and measuring the impact of projects in Kenyan communities. A pilot project was hence commissioned by 1%CLUB (Marianne), EyeOpenerWorks (Henrik, Martijn) and an external eye with the name Crosbond. The aim of this pilot was to find out whether new methodology would help in finding out the ‘most significant changes’ through projects. Guess what? The project was a success story! Local communities were ecstatic about being directly involved in the impact evaluation.
In Kibera myself, facilitating the process of the NGO Amani Kibera, I got a culture shock here. I was completely mesmerized about how this NGO organize their football teams, how they were friendly, welcoming and homely and how they were able to feel the urge to emotionally, passionately and proudly involve their members in interviews, receiving conclusive and personal feedback. The work that Amani Kibera has done here!!! Can be compared to the focus that ants do have to build their castle in readiness for the tough times ahead, this was just so awesome!!)
In Tetra Park village (where the NGO Kamane operates), Henrik and I got to be invited with open arms, even with sodas. It was evident that there was an issue of language barrier but I came in handy as a translator. We walked around for a short while and we got to see the informal settlement almost similar to Kibera but sort of smaller. The fact finding, follow-up, selection process of the stories, conversations from multiple sources, trust, and learning were all real-time and with this we could be able to find multiple sources of data that were synched together.
The Most Significant Change methodology for me was how the smooth transition from the old version of evaluation to the new dynamic method of monitoring. The participating NGOs were able to relate and adapt to the system quite much faster than I expected. They conducted the process all by themselves with minimal glitches!
-Crosbond Boera Moseti
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