Great Gambian adventure: Sector workshop

Last week the VSO programme office held a sector workshop for partners and volunteers. The idea was for everyone to come together and see how their work fits into the country strategic plan, look at what progress has been made so far, and think about what more needs to be done.

Abdoulie and I waiting in the wings before my presentation

The office asked me to do a presentation on monitoring and evaluation, so after hearing about the country strategic plan from Samba, and an overview on what volunteers have been working on from Abdoulie, it was my turn to speak.

I gave a bit of background about why we need monitoring and evaluation, particularly in context of the current international development climate, and what tools and processes we have in place for M&E at VSO. I focused on the annual partnership reviews (key monitoring and evaluation activity for VSO) because the process for 2013/14 is about to start again, and I highlighted the need for accurate volunteer reporting and data collection. Since I have been in place I have worked with the VSO office to develop new reporting templates for the volunteers to capture all the data that we need - particularly in relation to the APRs. As each new group of volunteers have come into the country I have shared the new templates with them and explained the need for them to feed their information to the office - and although I know that they try and explain it to partners where they can, it felt like a good opportunity to show our partners what we ask for and why.

Next I ran through some of our results. Doing this just ahead of the APR process was difficult, so I just gave an overview of how many people our country strategic plan aimed to reach, and how many people we think we have reached and worked with so far. It's tricky because reach is so often required by donors, but reach doesn't necessarily equal impact, so hopefully after the next round of partnership reviews we will have some more detailed information about what kind of outputs and results we are witnessing.

It was an interesting day - and although much more needs to be done to share information between partners and volunteers working across placements in the same programme / sector areas, the meeting hopefully represented the beginning of a more integrated process.