ISALS Monitoring and Evaluation

Once we had made it past mid term we knew we only had 5 week left on placement and so everything kicked up another gear!

The ISAL team finished their final ISAL training session which went down really well and the marketing team started on their set of three training sessions. While the marketing guys were planning and delivering their sessions there was still plenty of work the ISAL team needed to do. ICS is meant to promote sustainable development and to that end we have a team plan that we work to, that is part of a broader overall project plan that will cover the work of a number of cycles of volunteers. Within that project plan there are a number of short term, medium term and long term outcomes that our work is supposed to feed into.

This means, that as we did our initial survey on ISALS at the beginning of our training sessions to measure the level of knowledge within the beneficiaries we also have to do monitoring and evaluation throughout the placement to see how much the beneficiaries are benefitting from the work we are doing.

For each individual training session we had to prepare a plan before we ran the session. We ran each session 3 times to reach all our beneficiairies and after each session we would do some informal feedback getting the beneficiaries to give us a thumbs up or thumbs down for how each session had gone. As you might imagine they were very polite and usually gave us thumbs up!

However as we finished our sessions we had to prepare more formal M&E, and so we decided to do another survey of all the beneficiaries to gauge their knowledge. We were quick to point out to our interviewees that this was definitely not a test of their knowledge on ISALS but rather an opportunity for us to determine what further training was needed. We were very pleased to discover that overall the knowledge had definitely gone up among those who had attended the sessions, but there was still plenty for the next cycle to do!