Hello from the sunny Iganga, Uganda! For those of you who have not heard of me before, I am the recently arrived Global Health Corps volunteer who will be working in Monitoring and Evaluation for our favorite NGO here in Uganda!! (That would be Uganda Village Project, in case you forgot.) Tuesday the 26th of August marks five weeks that I have been in country, and what an incredible five weeks it has been! I have participated in shallow well clean-ups, malaria sensitizations (which I came to learn was a presentation, not a method of making malaria more sensible), spent a night in the communities, and learned a TON about Uganda Village Project (UVP). You all have participated/supported/championed/been part of an organization that really is having an impact in the Iganga District of Uganda and I am here to help show that impact. We have 8 main goals for the coming year, and probably time for 6 of them, so it is going to be a busy, yet amazing, year here!
This brings me to the topic of Monitoring and Evaluation. I thought in the
interests of clarity I would go back to our beloved Oxford Dictionary and
define both of these words so we can have a collective understanding of what
they mean. According to the Oxford
Dictionary, Monitoring is to “observe
and check the progress or quality of (something) over a period of time; keep
under systematic review”. Uganda Village
Project, as many of you know, has been great about keeping track of all their
health programs. They can tell you
exactly how many hand-washing presentations have been done in a village or what
percentage of malaria nets are hung correctly. This is the first step to
monitoring: reliably collecting the outputs of an intervention. What Julius and I will be working towards in the
coming year is being able to more reliably monitor the current programs of UVP,
as well as creating a method for the continuous monitoring of the outcomes of
their work. It is great that UVP knows
that 70% of the households in the Healthy Villages program have bed nets and
have been sensitized to malaria, but how does that affect their health? Are there decreases in symptoms of
malaria? Is there an increase in the
knowledge base of signs and symptoms of malaria for children? These questions are the type that we aim to
be able to measure after this year. By
answering these questions, UVP can more accurately represent its work to local
partners, international friends of the organization, and in grant applications. Reliable data on these indicators will also allow
UVP to continue to make informed decisions about what programs are effective,
an essential step if we hope to continue growing in the coming years.
Evaluation
is “the making of a
judgment about the amount, number, or value of something; assessment”. Whereas monitoring is to make sure the process
of an intervention is sound, and to measure some proximal outcomes and outputs
of work, evaluation is a measurement of the outcomes and
behaviors that may have been influenced by the intervention. This is incredibly important when showing the
impact that an organization has had. A
thorough evaluation is the way that any organization can say for sure that they
have changed the situation for the better.
Monitoring helps with this of course, but as it is run concurrently with
the intervention, it is hard to say for certain if the changes seen in the data
are going to be long-term changes or just a blip in their behavior.
Monitoring and Evaluation are sometimes criticized upon for
not valuing the individual. It is easy
for a single person to get lost in numbers, but with numbers we are able to
tell so much more than what can be seen on an individual level. This year Julius and I hope to be able to
bring the bigger picture into clarity, while not forgetting the amazing people
and stories that are present in our analysis. We both look forward to a life changing year,
and hope to share more of it with you in the upcoming months.
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