From Jakarta, seeds of accountability are planted in Palestine

Standing Team member Faten believes that working for the Child’s Rights program at Save the Children – helping to create more accountable programs for Palestinian children – has been one of the most interesting and useful experiences in her professional life.  Last fall she participated in the Standing Team Accountability and Impact Measurement Fundamentals workshop in Jakarta.  This was Faten’s first introduction to many of the key concepts of accountability, and she describes it as the starting point of a “breakthrough” in her work. She states that upon her return:

I was back full of energy to transfer this learning to colleagues and partner organizations. I called for several briefing sessions for staff at different levels in my organization, and I conducted a four day training for Save the Children staff and partners in Gaza, where there is a high need for accountability in the context of emergency.

Trainees from partner organizations were very impressed with this learning, and requested access to the training material in Arabic in order to conduct a similar training for their staff and volunteers.

Thank you Faten for sharing your experience!  We would love to hear from more of you.  How has the learning from past Standing Team workshops contributed to your work?  Share your thoughts as a comment on this post or email sarnason@care.org or klove@care.org if you’re interested in drafting a blog submission!

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VideoTIPS: Sajilu Kamwendo, Standing Team member

A video from the previous ECB workshop in Jakarta.

Sajilu –  Design, Monitoring & Evaluation Advisor, World Vision Zambia – reminds us why it is important to advocate for sharing learning with communities

 

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Using the data collection tools to “evaluate” the Jakarta workshop

To practice using data collection tools, participants pulled together a quick evaluation of the Jakarta workshop.

Matt, Sekai, and Adhong were Jakarta participants, and Silva was the facilitator. The rest of the group developed an evaluation plan with some evaluation questions and a list of data sources.

They divided up the work and consulted:

–        Documents (blog entries, blog comments, workshop report).

–        Key informants (Matt, Sekai, and Adhong together in a focus group; Silva as a one-on-one interview)

The group then met to compare and analyze the data and drew up conclusions and recommendations, and presented their findings.

Debriefing about the exercise:

Why did you chose the tools you used?

• Chose secondary data/document review, key informant interview, and a focus group discussion.
• Observation was not possible, the sample of respondents available was too small to do a survey and would have ended up being repetitive of the interviews, mapping wasn’t relevant.

How did you organize yourselves?

• One person did the document review, one team did the focus group, one team did the key informant interview.

How did you discover different information with each tool or each source?

• The facilitator and the participants had different perspectives on the same event, but also confirmed/triangulated each others’ responses.
• People and documents had complementary information.
• The document review was made easier because the research questions were pre-determined and the person delegated to do this knew what he was looking for.
• In the analysis meeting, they compared findings from the different groups and could triangulate findings.

Feedback from sources:

• The evaluators thanked them for their time, explained the purpose of the evaluation.
• Questions for Silva as the facilitator would have been better answered by the participants. Advise to really focus in on the specific point of view/expertise/role of key informants, whereas focus groups are more to capture collective perceptions.
• In the focus group, the facilitator gave enough time for each person to talk; the facilitator asked for clarification when necessary.
• The focus group questions were prepared ahead of time. The facilitator and note taker knew their roles.
• Phase your data collection. E.g. do quick document review so interviewers have some basic information off of which to ask questions to dig deeper, rather than collect the basic information from key informants or focus groups.
• Some questions were better asked of different sources (e.g. get objectives of the workshop from the report rather than asking participants or the facilitator to remember them).

[Comment on the last two points: the group planned to do this – get some of the basic facts from the document review before the interview/FG happened, but had trouble accessing the documents.]

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AIM Fundamentals Workshop: The Report

To see how it went and what we did, just click on the report.

 

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Last day of the workshop!

Click on the image to open the slideshow, or access the gallery here

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Workshop pictures from day 4

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Workshop photos continued…from Day 3

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Workshop photos from Day 2

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Workshop photos from day 1

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Workshop Closing

After a great and incredibly productive week, with lots of work and lots of fun, our time together came to an end.  We facilitators were hopeful that we met participants expectations. We were able to achieve our objectives for the workshop, which included:

• learning about agency and sector AIM tools
• sharing challenges in implementing AIM and reviewing options
• building the inter-agency multicultural team who will deploy together
• understanding deployment protocols
• securing commitments to sharing learning from deployments

The workshop, then, had a final activity, where we tossed a ball of string to each other, each person sharing one sentence (and only one!) about something they learned that week. One participant noted “I learned that there are people who care about accountability to beneficiary communities as much as I do.”

After tossing this ball around several times, we made a web. In the coming months and years, we will rely on each other and support each other in our work. Though we live far apart, we have committed to sharing our learning and experiences through the blog, case studies, phone calls, and more.

Thanks everyone, for a terrific workshop!

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