Mid-term review partner meeting

The main project that I work on here is 'Improving Agricultural Growers’ Associations in The Gambia' - a World Bank funded programme which is run through The Gambia Growth and Competitiveness Project. I posted back in February about the monitoring visit that I went on with the project Directors, and since then we have produced a trek report and a mid-term review report. These have been passed backwards and forwards between the Programme Office and the GCP team, until this week when it was time to present them to the partners and the volunteers involved in the project to get their feedback and input, and start to validate the reports. 

We met at a hotel on Cape Point, a pleasant 20 minute walk from my house. I put my headphones on and off I went, arriving at around 9am for breakfast (pizza and fish goujons - don't ask!) and a cup of coffee. 

Samba hard at work

Listening intently!

The meeting got under way around about the designated start time, a miracle in itself, and an hour before lunch / prayers I came to realise that the Programme Managers were rapidly running out of things to say. The questions from the participants had slowed, and we needed a filler. 

So I volunteered to do an impromptu presentation. 

Serious face!

Some follow up words about Monitoring and Evaluation
from the Country Director

I had been working on a quick reference guide about monitoring and evaluation for the partners, so I took the opportunity to show it to them and see if it met their needs. I wanted something that people could use as a resource, as I am very aware of the fact that there is only one of me and many of them, and I don't have much opportunity to work with them all individually. I put together the guide, and some document templates to go with it, in the hope that it would build partner capacity, and in turn they could do more monitoring and evaluation with the project beneficiaries. 

This is something that is very much needed. Because a lot of our work is about capacity building and knowledge transfer we need to be able to measure and monitor the extent to which we are building knowledge and passing information on to the stakeholders we are working with at grassroots level. To measure impact we have to consider, every time we do something with stakeholders, ‘how can we see if this is having an effect?’. For example, if conducting a training session on modern agricultural methods we need to design easy methods to assess knowledge at the beginning of the training, knowledge at the end of the training, and then – in order to really assess impact – methods to see how that knowledge has been used or implemented after an agreed period of time. While I can't develop templates and guidance for every monitoring need, I wanted to be able to help the partners to be able to do this for themselves. 

First page of the reference guide

The guide went down well. I received some good feedback about a couple of other areas the partners would like information on, and was reassured that it would be very helpful. 

It was very hard to go back to the meeting after lunch. Not only was I full of delicious food, it was hot and the pool looked so inviting! 

Donuts with a twist