So what do I do here?!

Work has been slowly picking up over the last few weeks. My position has become much clearer, and I am getting busier and busier. Would you believe I didn’t go to the beach at all last week!

My direct employer is NAWFA, the National Women’s Farming Association. However, I now understand that my role is much wider than this and NAWFA is, in a sense, just my base. I will be working with them, VSO and six other partners – which will mean working closely with my fellow volunteers who are involved with this project, and involve travelling around The Gambia.

VSO are leading a consortium of farming associations and training centres to work on the World Bank Growth and Competitiveness Project. One aspect of my role will be to develop the monitoring and evaluation systems and processes on behalf of VSO for the whole project, and work with the Programme Managers (when they are in position) to support them to use the system to monitor the project over the next three years. At the same time I will need to ensure that the central system is supported by M&E systems in each of the partner organisations, so that everything is consistent. This will involve working with staff at NAWFA and all of the other consortium members to find the best way of doing things, building capacity as I go.

So far my work has involved designing an M&E framework for the Country Director, re-configuring the work plan so that it can be used not only to show people what they need to be doing and when, but also to help us to monitor progress. I have also developed a reporting timeline for the World Bank project, and an integrated World Bank and VSO reporting timeline to link the two together. On Thursday we held a start-up workshop so that we could introduce the project, show the consortium members and other volunteers what I had been working on, and look at how we can all get started with our work against the activities within the work plan.

The day went really well, and everyone seems energised and ready to get going. I really have to start preparing all the documents that we will need now, so I can see a busy few weeks ahead.

On top of working on the World Bank project I have also helped the VSO office with recruiting new Programme Managers (working with the interview panel for 11 hours!) and have been asked to lead the Annual Partnership Review for the office. It will be a busy time, but I am glad to be getting stuck in to work now, and I’m really seeing what my role here will involve. It’s true what they said in training though – the roles that we are assigned to really can be as big as you want them to be, and I am happy to be working with the VSO office as much as the consortium members.