I recently took on a long term development project that involves a certain baby with beautiful blue eyes, so the blogging had to move to the back burner. But here is a fresh contribution for this month.
Consider the example of a project which aims to roll out extra computer lessons in Maths and Science in order to improve learner test scores in Maths and Science. We not only do pre-and post-testing of the learner test scores in the participating schools, but we also track how many hours of exposure the kids got, what content they covered, how they reacted to the content, etc. And we attend the project progress meetings where the project implementer reflects on the implementation of the project. Where we eventually don’t see the kind of learning gains anticipated, we are then able to pinpoint what went “wrong” with the implementation – frequently we can predict what the outcome will be based on what we know from the implementations. This manual on implementation research outlines a more systematic approach to figuring out how best to implement an initiative – written with the health sector in mind. What a client chooses to include in an evaluation is always up to them, but let this be a cautionary tale: A client recently declined to include a monitoring / evaluation component that considered programme fidelity, on the basis that it would make the evaluation too expensive. When we started collecting post-test data for the evaluation, we discovered a huge discrepancy between what happened on the ground, and what was initially planned– Leaving the donor, the evaluation team and the implementing agency with a situation that has progressed too far to fix easily. Perhaps if there was better internal monitoring this situation could have been prevented. But involving the evaluators in some monitoring would have definitely helped too!