Week 5: Work, work, work

Alright, wonk friends. This post is going to be highly nerdy, with my DC and IR friends in mind. It is also dedicated to Allison Shean and Esther Salazar, for being awesome MC ladies that have taught me so much about XLS coding, nerdy M&E shenanigans, and life over the past few months. Enjoy.

With four weeks of work under my belt here in Ethiopia, I think it’s high time I tell you all what it is exactly I’ve been up to. My title is “Learning and Knowledge Management Intern.” This title spans two major departments at Mercy Corps—Research and Learning and Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (I’m learning SO MUCH!!).

The Research and Learning Department receives funding from a variety of sources to do research all over the world, sometimes directly linked to Mercy Corps programming, other times a bit more tangential, but always on issues at the forefront of international humanitarian assistance and development. When I joined the Policy & Advocacy team at Mercy Corps in January, Keith Proctor (who bridges the PA and Research departments) was wrapping up a fantastic research piece called “Youth and Consequences,” which sought to understand why it is that young people join extremist groups. It was exciting to get to see that piece in some of the late stages of production, as well as its rollout this spring. Our Director of Research and Learning, Jon Kurtz, did a wonderful piece of research here in Ethiopia a few years ago—it’s called “From Conflict to Coping,” and well worth the read. Allison Shean, a research officer who is based in DC and who’s been of invaluable assistance to me in preparing for this position, did a very cool report called “Rethinking Resilience” on gender and resilience in Africa’s Sahel—another fascinating piece that’s become ubiquitous in MC offices and an essential resource for resilience programming.

Mercy Corps received funding in 2012 to do a pair of studies in Uganda and Ethiopia that look at whether certain of our programs across a variety of topics contribute to household and community resilience (come to my presentation in DC this fall—I’ll go into more detail on this survey then). The Ethiopia baseline portion of the study was completed in 2013; I’m conducting the endline. The survey tool is one of the coolest things I’ve ever gotten to work on. It’s brought together so many themes from my first year of Georgetown classes, and the most interesting parts of my last two internships (again, see me in September for more detail). I’ve spent the last two months coding the survey into XLS (no small feat, if I dare say so myself). We’re now in the process of uploading it to a server and downloading it onto tablets, which we’ll use to administer the survey. My scope of work says I'm administering the survey, but I have the invaluable support of several Mercy Corps staffers I got to work with the last time I was in the south. I’m working with a team of four supervisors, each of whom will supervise a team of three enumerators, who are mostly university instructors. Tomorrow I start training them; then, they’ll go out into three different woredas (a large county-sized regional division) and visit households that were interviewed for the baseline survey in over 10 kebeles (very small village divisions). I’m then responsible for cleaning the data, checking it to make sure it’s all good quality, and preparing it for analysis by our technical consultants. This is the quantitative portion of the study; our supervisors will also be conducting semi-structured interviews with community members to add a narrative piece to the data. I’ll be helping to analyze and report on this data back in DC.

MEL at Mercy Corps is a bit different—while there is a headquarters MEL department and there are some organizational standards for MEL, project- and country-level staff are really essential for designing and implementing monitoring and evaluation plans for MC projects around the world. They are tasked with understanding the communities Mercy Corps serves, and therefore they have the best sense of how to identify entry points for impact and tracking that impact over time. If you’re less of a wonk and therefore not particularly familiar with the granting process of NGOs like Mercy Corps, this is the quick version: grant-making organizations, corporations, or agencies (here is USAID’s process, for example) will put out a solicitation (a “request for applications” or something like that) describing the sort of project they would like to fund, with detailed requirements for agencies applying. These agencies then assemble a proposal, and the grant-makers will decide which of the applicants has put forward the strongest project proposal, and award the grant accordingly. One of the application components is monitoring and evaluation (M&E), which describes how the agency will track its progress on the proposed project, and how it will report on its progress to the grant-makers. There are a bunch of tools used to monitor and evaluate projects; some combination of qualitative (surveys and interviews) and quantitative (LOTS of numbers tracking money, beneficiaries, milk, goats, you name it).

At the moment, the Mercy Corps Ethiopia office is in the process of launching a national-level M&E system that will allow all projects from here on out to use the same tools for data collection, making the M&E process much more streamlined. I’ve been supporting our national level team in finalizing various components of this new system. It’s very interesting to see what’s common across all projects—you have to be very clear about your problem statement, explaining why this project needs to be done; about your strategic objectives, which try to address the issue at hand; about who you’re trying to reach, and why they are the targeted beneficiaries, rather than someone else. What’s probably much more interesting than writing these M&E forms is seeing the answers come in…sadly I’ll be out of here by the time they start rolling in, but the standardized system will allow Mercy Corps Ethiopia to look at individual projects as well as the system as a whole and see whether  they’re meeting targets and how they're making change.

In addition to this broader, more technical aspect of M&E, I’m also getting to do an exciting, meaty piece of it in the field. I spent my second week in Ethiopia in “the field” following our CHELBI team around to several capacity-building workshops, visiting areas of land that have been rehabilitated through the program, and fording rivers to visit nurseries that produce trees for these rehabilitated areas and for peoples’ farms. Over the next few weeks I’m writing a series of case studies for the office at USAID that funds this program to look at some intricate aspects of the program—my favorite of these is the youth part. It was so fun and fascinating to sit with the kebele youth as they discussed climate change, their natural resource needs, and what they can do in their communities to ensure a bright future for themselves and their families.

Ok, I think I’ve gone on significantly longer than is really acceptable for a blog. I’m back in Arba Minch and super excited for the next three fieldwork weeks of training and data collection. I’ll try to keep Facebook filled with photo updates, and obviously keep an eye on Instagram too. The moment I stepped off the plane here I felt elated to be back, and I can’t wait for this survey process to finally begin.