Monday, November 2, 2009

Learning from the Jokko Initiative Pilot Phase: Tostan, CEGA and UNICEF collaborate on evaluation design and baseline study

As the Jokko Initiative starts up its pilot phase, we wanted to share more on this blog about the monitoring and evaluation strategies of the project. Tostan and UNICEF have been collaborating with the Center of Evaluation for Global Action (CEGA) of the University of California Berkeley for the past nine months on co-designing the outcomes and evaluation design of the project.

In the upcoming weeks, Tostan and CEGA will be implementing a baseline study just before the start of the SMS module in the Tostan classes in the Velingara Region, the focus zone of the project. The objective of the baseline, which starts on Monday, Nov. 2, is to capture the knowledge and practices of the class participants before the modules so that this information can be compared to the participants after the end of the module. The evaluation will take place in March 2010.

The main areas under study will be the project's outcomes on literacy, social networking and youth participation with a sample of about 20 villages and 800 direct beneficiaries. The design will also include about 200 comparison participants in 5 comparison villages without the RapidSMS roll-out. Through this evaluation cycle, Tostan hopes to learn more about the project's hypotheses:

--Introducing SMS into literacy programming will reinforce literacy practice during and after the intervention
--Empowering women and youth to use cell phones will widen their communications sphere, and allow them to be more effective changemakers and economic actors
--Using RapidSMS will activate youth participation and help make community mobilization and projects more effective

The team hopes to use not only the surveys themselves to gather this information, but to also monitor how the system is being used through the RapidSMS interface itself. Tostan supervisors and facilitators will be in place throughout the pilot phase.

Results will be ready in June 2010 on the evaluation, and CEGA, Tostan and UNICEF hope to conduct a follow-up survey in September 2010 to see the longer term effect of the training on participants.

Contact:
Cody Donahue
cody@tostan.org
Tostan / www.tostan.org

Theresa Beltramo
tbeltramo@berkeley.edu
CEGA / cega.berkeley.edu

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

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