A Great Week at Work

Lately there have been some great leaps and bounds at work. As I said in my last post, my evaluation/educational proposal went up for approval. The first step was convincing the executive committee (all the decision makers) to approve it and put it before the house. This went off smoothly, and most of the members of the committee were very excited about it.

Three days later was a general assembly meeting. This is where any large projects get put before elected representatives within the district, to be approved. I was called upon to go to the front of the room at the podium and explain briefly my proposal. Alas, the house approved the proposal and it looks like funds will come in the next couple of weeks for the project.

What this means for me, is that I now have to design this whole evaluation down to the tee, so that it can run as smoothly as possible and be effective. This was a huge step for the District Assembly because it is extremely rare that they finance their own evaluations. One of this size has never been conducted with their own funds. Only when donors have come in has the Assembly gone out to do field evaluations.

So the opportunity for great changes has come. There’s a chance that if this evaluation is conducted well and the findings are proven to be very useful, then perhaps the District Assembly might value and budget for monitoring and evaluation in the future.

Taking all this into account, I’m just working feverishly to make sure that it is as great as possible, so as to have the most impact on the beneficiaries. Done well, I believe that the information gathered, and the participation instilled and taken by the communities will really move the district forward.

Other exciting news is that I’m learning how to ride a motorcycle. Lately the works department guys and I have been going out to the field more to monitor contractors and make sure that they are building quality infrastructure. With my co-workers, we created a field monitoring form to fill out, that way we can start to keep track of the work that different contractors do. Through this, better infrastructure can be built, as well as ensuring that certain contractors don’t receive projects in the future.

For now it’s back to the drawing board for designing this evaluation. I’ve got one month to clearly design all of the logistics as well as our approach in the communities and what exactly we will be doing. Once I’ve got that figured out, I will train the 21 people doing the evaluation. In January, it looks like I will be spending the majority of my time in the field visiting 40 communities or so and monitoring the evaluator teams. The whole evaluation is targeted at visiting all 281 communities in the district, by using 8 evaluator teams. It should be a jammed packed two months, filled with a lot of learning and interacting with the primary beneficiaries.