Week 3 - Updates from the Field

Week 3 of my AMREF M&E course proved to be very long and tiring as it began with all 7 groups completing their evaluation tool in order to prepare for our field evaluation day at Saint John’s Community Centre (SJCC) on Tuesday. As promised, here are my reflections from the field evaluation in Pumwani District.

Outside the SJCC

Of course I knew the day wouldn’t run as smoothly as planned, especially when you try to mobilize 50 people. We were instructed to meet at AMREF by 8:30am and head to Pumwani by 9:00am, of course almost one hour later we actually left the training centre. We arrived at SJCC around 10:30am, disembarked the bus and were welcomed by the 2 staff members of SJCC and the participants whom we were to be conducting our evaluations with.

Our stellar bus! I was able to relax...because God was in control!

The SJCC project that we were evaluating was a child development program whereby satellite schools, home work clubs and talent clubs were established throughout the communities of Pumwani. The overall goal of the program is to improve the quality of life for orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) by the end of 2011. The program is currently in its 3rd year of a 5 year program so our work was to be used as the midterm evaluation.

My group spent the previous week designing a Focus Group Discussion (FGD) tool in order to evaluate the Club Patrons whose main responsibility in the program is to ensure that children’s talents are nurtured in order to keep children off of the streets and in school longer. When we arrived at SJCC there were many Club Patrons available to join our FGD. However, since the structure of the day was unorganized and another group from class was supposed to conduct structured interviews with the same set of participants we kept losing participants for our FGD and ended up with only 4 when the recommend amount is between 6-12 participants. Nonetheless, we collected a lot of information from only a few participants but were unable to conduct a second FGD in order to compare the findings. The Club Patrons who were a part of our FGD were very forthcoming with our questions and as a group, we felt like we did learn a lot about the program. However, when all 7 groups discussed their findings on Wednesday we realized that there were some gaps in the information which has thus lead to challenges when analyzing the data and writing the report!  

FGD with direct beneficiaries of the SJCC program

So now you have all of this qualitative information and what do you do with it? As a class, we spent the remainder of the week learning how to analyze qualitative data which is not as easy as it sounds. Thankfully, for this session of the course we have a lively and very intelligent Kenyan facilitator who is Kikuyu and has a hard time differentiating between the letters “r” and “l” when he speaks ie: apparently cows chew “glass” not “grass”! On top of the fact that he is very knowledgeable, I get a kick out of listing to him speak which also holds my attention throughout 8 hours of class!

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As for this past weekend, on Saturday I had a fun filled day of analyzing our quantitative data in SPSS in class. It was a long and full day of staring at a computer and I had to leave around 4pm in order to have my afternoon siesta which turned into a 4 hour sleep on a counter of staying out too late the previous night...Oh Nairobi!

On Sunday I went to Hell’s Gate National Park with two girls from class and Mike and his friend. I have to say that being a Tanzanian/East African resident has come in rather handy in Kenya as I get a discount on all park entry fees which adds up to a lot of money if you have to pay the regular foreigner price...thanks TZ! Hell’s Gate, known for its hot springs was really cool. Our journey started out via a 10K bicycle ride from the entrance to Hell’s Gate Gorge where we hiked through the Gorge to see the hot springs. We intended to bike back to the main gate but daylight, pending rain and tiredness were not on our side. As much as we made fun of Mike for not biking and driving to the Gorge we ended up eating our words at the end of the day. Pole Mike!

Hell's Gate Gorge

View from the bottom

I was officially the dirtiest at the end of the day 

View from the top

Pondering life!