ACGC Connect - Winter 2013

A PUBLICATION OF THE ALBERTA COUNCIL FOR GLOBAL COOPERATION

WINTER 2013

Building knowledge and skills in monitoring and evaluation “People want to be more effective and efficient when implementing their projects, but a lot of people don’t know that monitoring and evaluation can be used as a tool to do just that.”

MEASURING OUR IMPACT

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Beyond the Call of Duty, MSSO The Goat is to Be Halal: Field-Level Lessons, EWB

Sentema Engineer Gebreyes Haile High School, RFTF Measuring the Impact of Literacy Programming, CW4WAfghan

Taking a Look at Hard Choices, ACGC IDW 2014: Youth Making An Impact, ACGC

Cover photo: Monitoring a biosand filter project. Photo by CAWST.

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When implementing a project, organizations often overlook the processes of monitoring and evaluation, or they have generic, resource-intensive processes that don’t always provide useful feedback into the project. However, when done effectively, monitoring and evaluation are key to ensuring a project is successful and that lessons learned can be captured and incorporated in future projects.

CAWST, the Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology, has the mandate to build the capacity of local organizations in the areas of water and sanitation. This includes walking alongside local organizations guiding them to effectively monitor their projects. This model of mentorship takes a very systematic process and makes it both practical and useful to the practitioner.

“People want to be more effective and efficient when implementing their projects, but a lot of people don’t know that monitoring and evaluation can be used as a tool to do just that. It’s not just to report back to donors. No one explains that to them,” explains Tal Woolsey, CAWST’s International Technical Advisor in Africa. To lessen the gap in knowledge as to why monitoring and evaluating projects are important, CAWST works with the people on the ground. Starting with a five-day workshop, project managers learn the differences between monitoring and evaluating and they come up with reasons why this process is necessary.

A CAWST consultant then accompanies the organization’s staff in the field. By working on an existing project rather than just conceptually, the organization is able to understand and implement processes and solutions immediately. Understanding why monitoring and evaluating need to be done are just as important as the processes themselves. When practitioners understand the chain of events that need to occur even after their implementation is complete, the success and sustainability of their project greatly increases.

By Jenai Lieu, CAWST

Beyond the Call of Duty

Vision testing of a rural student.

Photo courtesy of MSSO

Maharashtra Seva Samiti Organization (MSSO)’s Blindness Prevention Program among Rural Children is working towards the World Health Organization’s global initiative, Vision 2020: The Right to Sight. Children living in rural areas face multiple problems in accessing quality eye care services. The project initially intended to reach 40,000 rural children for eye screening and testing through two mobile eye clinics in order to prevent blindness in future life.

To create awareness, the plan was to visit nearly 500 schools and teach students about preventive measures for eye health using the assistance of 2,500 teachers trained over a span of five years. However, in less than two years of operation, the project has successfully screened 42,968 students of which more than 2300 students were found to have some form of vision deficiencies. At this rate, the team will screen more than 100,000 students by 2017.

While running the education programs in schools about eye-health care, the outreach team faced some unexpected challenges. It came to their attention that there were many reasons besides vision deficiency that were inhibiting children from attending school. There cannot be improvement in school

performance – and thereby improvement in overall health – if there is no attendance at school.

The outreach team running the project went beyond the call of duty to reach out to dropout students. Counseling groups and awareness programs were established in order to expand the potential of the project. The team not only screened for vision deficiency but also taught them how to read and write. The outreach team is also expanding its scope beyond the regular school system by visiting playschools, kindergartens and special schools for students with mental challenges, and hearing impairments. Though the project envisioned screening of students in age group of 3-16 years, the outreach team has also accommodated the screening of children below the age of 3 years.

The success of this project has generated a large number of pediatric patients, which in turn has led to overcrowding in hospitals. Thus, steps are being taken to expand the outpatient services for hospitals in the rural areas. A sustainable financial model for preventive intervention for eye health has now been introduced in the rural district. Moreover, many students now self-manage eye care and promote eye health in their homes, and vision has been restored/corrected within much of the rural student population.

There cannot be improvement in school performance if there is no attendance at school.

by Maharashtra Seva Samiti Organization

The Goat is to be Halal: Field-level Lessons on Scaling Community-Led Total Sanitation

Photo courtesy of EWB

In 2011, the Engineers Without Borders Water and Sanitation team paired with an NGO conducting Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) activities in a district of Malawi. CLTS is an approach to sanitation education that aims to trigger villages into ceasing open defecation. Our aim was to influence the process by which our partner NGO administered their program, and we sought to develop and guide them towards a system of implementation and monitoring that could be effectively transitioned to local government at the end of the project.

Contracts were signed and we began as agreed. EWB promoted the use of trained government extension staff to conduct CLTS activities. We sought input from district government and field staff when designing our program. People were happy and we were proud of our work. Extension staff were conducting follow-ups; and open-defecation-free villages were emerging. Preparing for handover, we mapped out the roles and responsibilities for the CLTS program and presented it to district managers. They thanked us and assigned a capable, energetic submanager to take up our work.

Meanwhile, we started organizing CLTS celebrations for communities certified as open-defecation-free. We had a small budget to purchase a Fanta for each participant.

This is when the group village headman came requesting T-shirts and goat meat. It quickly became clear that another NGO, working nearby was contemplating providing a bicycle ambulance to each village along with T-shirts and goat meat.

We spoke with the other NGO and discussed the implications of setting expectations we could not possibly meet. They said they understood, but their budget was set — they had to spend their money.

Then, the young manager trialing our CLTS program entered the conversation.

He could only mobilize half of his extension staff because he could not afford the per diems that we and the big-budget NGO had provided. The extension staff he could mobilize were facing challenges assembling communities— a village headman, upon discovering that his village would not receive an elaborate celebration for achieving open-defecation-free status, told villagers not to participate in the program.

It was also emerging that the carefully developed CLTS monitoring process was not sustainable. Government representatives could not afford the fuel needed to collect forms in the way we had established. The time needed for data input was also more than the assigned manager could spare.

So what happened? The larger NGO had their elaborate celebrations and we had ours. Photos were taken. High fives were given. We seeded notions about how to administer the program – notions the local government is now working to break down to develop a manageable one. We failed to work within the constraints of local government.

While we were interested in developing a transferable system, we also had to show it was successful. For real sustainability though, pilots need to be designed entirely within the resource constraints of the scaling institution.

Instead, pressured to achieve results, we injected time, energy, and resources to meet targets. We “made” our pilot work and our success was unsustainable as a result.

For real sustainability, pilot programs need to be designed entirely within the resource constraints of the local NGOs and institutions

Note: A version of this article originally appeared in EWB’s 2012 Failure Report. Read more at ewb.ca

By Michael Kennedy & Kristina Nilsson

Check out the Global Hive toolkit online for more monitoring and evaluation ideas.

ACGC helped develop the Global Hive public engagement resources as part of the Inter-Council Network. globalhive.ca

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Sentema Engineer Gebreyes Haile High School In Ethiopia, schools are concentrated Students in urban areas. Sentema is located in a living with rural area in Western Ethiopia. There are their families 6 elementary schools in the region, but are able to access to secondary school is further than 40 km away. Parents, whose livelihood contribute is based on subsistence farming or petty to the family trade, have found it impossible to pay for income. accommodation, upkeep, and other costs of secondary schooling away from home. The tragic result of these obstacles was that up to 90% of students would drop out of school after completing their primary education. Young people were leaving the region and walking across the vast deserts of Sudan or Somalia, trying to get to Yemen or Egypt or Saudi Arabia for work. It was known that girls were being abducted and killed for their organs, which were sold on the black market. Something had to change!

The elders of the community approached Support for Sustainable Development, an Ethiopian NGO, whose Director General has roots in the community. SSD mobilized the community and the local government to construct a fully equipped high school on the top of a hill in Sentema. Rainbow for the Future covered 78% of the cost of the project, including furniture and equipment for biology and chemistry labs, the library, and also a teacher’s residence.

The school was officially opened in October 2012. It accommodates grades 9 and 10 - currently numbering 554 students, of which almost half are girls! The school is sustained by the local school administration, education offices at district and zone levels, and by the community parent/school committee. There are parents who were previously forced

to drop their education due to the lack of access, and are now enrolled in the school alongside their children.

The school has been described as a precious gift and a rebirth for the community.

The numbers of young people now able to attend school beyond grade 8 tell only part of the results story. The community itself is growing rapidly as students and their families move closer to the school.

The families who rely on subsistence farming are able to supplement their income by renting living quarters at reasonable rates. Because the students are able to continue living with their families as they go to school, they are able to continue to contribute to the family income.

A very powerful result is the relief of parents that their children do not have to be sent far away with no one to watch over them. Until the school was built, parents were more inclined to have their children marry at a very early age to protect them from threats of drug abuse, rape, and teen pregnancy. Now both students and parents can relax and work together for a bright future.

Photo by Barbara Wilson

by Barbara Wilson, Rainbow for the Future

Measuring the Impact of Literacy Programming At CW4WAfghan, one of our key A little girl had programs is focused on the out-of-school gone to school youth and adult population and serving but forgotten their education needs through literacy. In her literacy Afghanistan, sustaining literacy outcomes has been challenging. One study found because she that a mere 30% of women (with primary had no access education only) could still read and write to books. as adults (UNICEF Afghanistan, 2010/11).

Nancy Hatch Dupree, the great Afghanistan scholar and historian, once met a little girl who had gone to school, but forgotten her literacy because she had no access to books.

The memory inspired her to launch the ABLE Library (‘ACKU Boxed Library Extension’) program, which is a portable library of local language books produced for new Afghan readers.

Yet many literacy programs collect only short-term outcome data: using testing alone to measure literacy immediately after class completion. Such data may not capture the reality that many of those learners will lose their literacy without further support. How we’ve tried to mitigate this problem in our own programming is by emphasizing access to reading material.

To support access to reading material, all of our literacy classes are equipped with one of the ABLE Libraries. Literacy students are encouraged to borrow the books and take them home where family members can also be exposed to reading.

The libraries remain in the communities, often placed in a local public school, so that students can continue to use them after graduating from their literacy classes. Literacy teachers receive training in basic librarianship as well as in reading promotion. They learn ways in which they can involve learners in reading activities such as parent-and-child reading hours,

Upcoming ACGC Events

reading contests, and helping learners find reading material that is interesting and relevant to their lives.

We also try to sustain literacy outcomes by applying a holistic framework to literacy teaching. Literacy is integrated with other skills, including health, hygiene, nutrition and human rights. In some agricultural communities, women literacy students also learn basic business skills, strengthening their roles – and income – as agricultural producers.

Further, the social connections that a literacy class can provide are critically important in the context of rural Afghanistan where women can be extremely isolated, having little contact with people outside their families.

Women find valuable support networks, friendship and an escape from the every day by attending a literacy class with other women and girls.

Besides gaining a practical skill, the classes can add meaning and purpose to their lives, part of the empowerment that literacy gives – if it is well sustained during and beyond the classes. Providing access to relevant reading material, helping literacy teachers double as librarians, and integrating literacy with other skills to make learning comprehensive, will help ensure that is the case.

Photo courtesy of CWFWAfghan

By Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan (CW4WAfghan)

ACGC cordially invites you and yours to join us for our annual Holiday Parties this December. On December 5th, join us in Edmonton from 4-7 PM at the ACGC offices (10816A – 82 Avenue) for an evening of wine, snacks, and holiday cheer. On December 12th, join us in Calgary from 4-7 PM at the Fair Planet Boutique in Northland Village Mall (5111 Northland Drive NW) for snacks, beverages, and a chance to get some holiday shopping done!

Coming up in the New Year, watch out for our annual membership survey. Your feedback helps us serve you better!

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Taking a Look at Hard Choices

Speakers David Jefferess and Donna KennedyGlans Photo courtesy of ACGC

Can partnerships with corporations make development work more effective at reducing poverty overseas? Are NGOs compromising their integrity and the health of their partner communities by entering public-private partnerships with mining companies in their region?

These were some of the hotly-debated issues on display at our Hard Choices public forum in September. ACGC cohosted the event with University of Calgary International as part of our annual AGM and public engagement weekend. The discussion kept the room on the edge of their seats. Guest speakers from across the spectrum debated the merits of these partnerships – and let the audience judge how persuasive the arguments were.

Speakers included CAWST board member and businessman Ken Bagan, corporate lawyer and CARE Canada board member Paul Drager, MLA and energy sector leader Donna Kennedy-Glans, UBC professor David Jefferess, and North-South Institute Researcher Shannon Kindornay. CARE in particular is often seen as ahead of the pack in exploring corporate partnerships in its projects, with its recent

agreement with Barrick and Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development to fund CARE’s work in Peru. Paul Drager explained that the NGO carefully debated whether all three partners’ interests aligned prior to deciding to pursue the partnership.

Each speaker took advantage of the rare opportunity to present different sides of the debate in a respectful, thoughtful dialogue, even when they disagreed.

With the Federal Government’s encouragement of the publicprivate partnership model, the debate will continue for years to come. Listen to a full recording of the evening’s event on the ACGC Connect podcast at acgc.libsyn.com.

We were also pleased to present outgoing Board Chair Paul Carrick with the ACGC Award of Excellence for Leadership in International Cooperation, recognizing his decades of leadership in the province and in his work with CAUSE Canada. Thanks to all of the ACGC members who contributed to our Annual General Meeting during the weekend at the University of Calgary. It was heartening to see so many organizations sharing their new projects and ideas for the direction of Alberta’s international development sector.

Guest speakers from across the spectrum debated the merits of public-private partnerships.

by Chris Chang-Yen Phillips, ACGC Staff

International Development Week 2014: Youth Making an Impact

Photo by Chris Chang-Yen Phillips

As we’ve seen in this issue’s stories, you can make a difference, and you can help create the next generation of changemakers. On January 30th 2014, ACGC invites high schools around Alberta to participate in the next Youth Day in Edmonton, helping mark International Development Week across Canada. ACGC’s Youth Day allows a younger crowd to be part of the University of Alberta’s annual International Week, its largest extracurricular educational event.

Bring your class to Edmonton to join in a free day of hands-on workshops and speakers introducing students to the world of social justice and creating solutions for a healthier world.

N’Dri Assié-Lumumba, from the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, will be speaking at this year’s Youth Day. Professor Assié-Lumumba will bring her considerable expertise in African and Diaspora education, gender, and international development to help students understand where the world is headed in the fight against poverty after the UN’s Millennium Development Goals end in 2015.

ACGC is also looking for Albertan youth and global youth affiliated with our member organizations to participate in the creation of our Top 30 Under 30 magazine, featuring thirty dedicated young people who are making a difference locally and globally. This magazine will be widely distributed during International Development Week, and is an amazing opportunity to support and showcase the phenomenal work young people are doing. This year’s theme is “We are Making a Difference”. Head to acgc.ca and download the Top 30 Under 30 Magazine form under “IDW” to nominate an extraordinary young person! This year’s deadline is before December 13th.

by Chris Chang-Yen Phillips, ACGC Staff

ACGC Connect is published by the Alberta Council for Global Cooperation with the financial assistance of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada (DFATD). The views expressed by the publication are not necessarily those of ACGC or its member groups.

ACGC is a coalition of NGOs working in Alberta and committed to advocating harmonious relations among nations and to promoting equitable community development within nations which is people-centred, democratic, just, sustainable, inclusive and respectful of indigenous cultures.

ACGC can be contacted at: Suite 205, 10816A - 82 Avenue Edmonton, AB T6E 2B3 Tel: 780.988.0200 | Fax: 780.988.0211 Email: admin@acgc.ca | Twitter: @ACGCNow Visit our website at: www.acgc.ca E-NEWSLETTER If you would prefer to receive an electronic copy of the newsletter in the future instead of a printed copy, please contact admin@acgc.ca or 780.988.0200. Thank you.

Program undertaken with the financial support of the Government of Canada provided through Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada (DFATD) Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada

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Affaires étrangères, Commerce et Développement Canada

ACGC CURRENT MEMBERSHIP NOVEMBER 2013 Action International Ministries • Ainembabazi Children’s Project • Alberta Public Interest Research Group • Alberta Teachers’ Association • Altamas for Peace and Development Association • Bridges of Hope International Network of Dev Agencies Inc. • Calgary Board of Education Global Learning Program • Canada World Youth • Canadian Association for Participatory Development • Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace • Canadian Department of Peace Initiative • Canadian Humanitarian • Canadian Moravian Mission Society • Canadian Peacemakers International • Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan • Caro-Canadians Reaching Out to the World’s Children Foundation • CAUSE Canada • CEIBA Association • Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology • Centre for Global Citizenship Education and Research • Change for Children Association • Covenant International Ministry • Engineers Without Borders- Canada • Four Worlds Centre for Development Learning • Ghost River Rediscovery • Global Education Program, University of Alberta International • HIV Edmonton • Human Development Foundation • John Humphrey Centre for Peace and Human Rights • Keiskamma Canada Foundation • Light Up the World • Maharashtra Seva Samiti Organization • Mahatma Gandhi Canadian Foundation for World Peace • Marda Loop Justice Film Festival • Mennonite Central Committee Alberta • Micah Centre (Kings University College) • Minkha • Mission of Mercy • One Child’s Village • One! International Poverty Relief • Operation Eyesight Canada • Optometry Giving Sight • Oxfam Canada • Rainbow for the Future • Rainbow of Hope for Children • RESULTS • Sahakarini Inter-World Education & Development Association • Samaritan’s Purse Canada • Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute • Sinkunia Community Development Organization • Somali-Canadian Education & Rural Development Organization • Sombrilla International Development Society • STOP TB Canada • Student Umbrella for Social Justice • Trickster Theatre • True Vision Ghana • Unisphere Global Research Centre • United Nations Association in Canada • Women’s Empowerment International Foundation • World Fit For Children - Alberta Chapter