Clare Hanbury

Participatory Approaches to Monitoring and Evaluation Using the FLIP Camera

A great idea for building more participation into your monitoring and evaluation strategies!

Those who know me well, know that I go on and on and on and on and on and on about using the flip camera in the field and for monitoring and evaluation. I have been taking mine everywhere with me for the last 4 years and it is still going strong. Every Xmas I buy another member of my family one and I try to persuade every client I work with to purchase one or to get me to purchase one when on my way to an overseas assignment. They are amazing and so easy to use.

Here is a great little video from War Child about using the flip camera to make video diaries - a participatory approach to monitoring and evaluation. Thanks to Linda Raftree for alerting me to this video. She adds and important hint at the bottom of her post.....Hint: Flip video cameras are fantastic for filming, but the Flip video format is incompatible with a lot of (most?) video editing software. According to Ernst, if you’re using Flip video cameras and need to edit, Windows Movie Maker Live is the way to go.

 Linda writes a great blog too.

 

An Evaluation Guide for Participation Practitioners

I know that there are many of you who are enjoying my evaluation series over on the Lifeskills Handbooks site. I have just come across an interesting handbook that may be of interest to those of you involved in evlauting projects where chidlrena nd young peopel are important participants.

 A Practitioner’s Guide to Developmental Evaluation

Click on the link above to access the guide.

Developmental evaluation is an approach that has as its goal learning, not judgment

The guide contains the lessons and insights of a group of practitioners who collaborated on a program called YouthScape, which aimed to support the engagement of young people in their communities—a program that by its nature was clearer on its goals than on the means to attain them, and which involved all the stakeholders in an intense learning process. Youthscape has an online document for practitioners of youth engagement projects. You can access this by clicking here.

Monitoring and Evaluating Childrens Participation: A New Initiative

VERY EXCITING!!!

There is a new initiative underway to test a conceptual framework for Monitoring and Evaluating Children's Participation. The framework is available from the Children's Rights Information Network (CRIN). I have set out the introduction to this work below and links to two key documents: the framework and the toolkit. There are many practitioners in my community and in my sister community www.lifeskillshandbooks.com who may be interested in using this and perhaps joining the project.

Some of you may know that I was involved in developing A booklet on Monitoring an Evaluating Children's Participation for The Child-to-Child Trust (click here to view the publication) and so it was with great excitement that I saw this and I am now very keen to get it out to my networks. 

The text below is taken from the web-based introduction to the framework.

In recent years, there has been growing recognition of the need for better approaches to monitoring and evaluating children's participation. And the potential for improved monitoring has been strengthened by the adoption of CRC General Comment No.12, The Right of the Child to be Heard, which provides new clarity in elaborating the scope of A12 and how governments are expected to implement it. Further guidance is provided in the accompanying resource guide, "Every Child's Right to be Heard" to be published by Save the Children/UNICEF in September 2011.

Of course, as a fundamental human right, the opportunity to be listened to and taken seriously must not be contingent on evidence as to effective outcomes. However, there is a powerful case for more rigorous measurement of what is being done to give effect to the right embodied in Article 12 of the CRC. Through the development of clearer indicators and benchmarks against which to chart children's participation, it will be possible to:

• Define the legislative and policy environment needed to promote and respect children's right to participation
• Enable children to gain a greater understanding of what they hope to achieve,
• Assess the strengths and weaknesses of initiatives and the quality of the participation process
• Identify what support and resources are needed to strengthen children's participation
• Provide evidence to support the case for political commitment to the realisation of children's participation rights.

This September, Save the Children, UNICEF, Plan International and World Vision, supported by funding from the Oak Foundation, are launching a pilot study to test out a new conceptual framework, supported by a toolkit, for monitoring and evaluating children's participation. Children and young people will be actively involved in the monitoring and evaluation processes.

The framework falls into two discrete but linked parts:

1. Benchmarks or standards against which to measure the extent to which child participation has been institutionalised at the national and local level – whether the necessary legislative, policy, social and cultural changes have been made. It can be used to help determine priorities for advocacy in building a culture of respect for children's right to express views and be taken seriously.
2. Benchmarks or standards against which to measure the actual experience of participation:

Scope - what degree of participation has been achieved and at what stages of programme development - in other words – What is being done?

Quality - to what extent have participatory processes complied with the agreed standards for effective practice – in other words – How is it being done?

Outcome - what has been the outcome – on young people themselves, on families, on the supporting agency, and on the wider realisation of young people's rights within families, local communities and at local and national governmental level – in other words – What has been achieved?

Click here for the framework

The toolkit provides detailed guidance on how to undertake monitoring and evaluation involving children and young people, and suggested strategies and activities that can be used for collecting and analysing the data with children and adults.

Click here for the toolkit

For any comments and queries on this project please contact the project team. Their numbers are at the bottom of this page

Monitoring and Evaluating with Childen and Young People

I am sure that there are MANY of you out there who are highly skilled reflective practitioners. In the next three and a half months I really need you and your skills!  I will be posting 15 weekly extracts from two documents I have put together with the Jacobs Foundation on monitoring and evaluating life skills for youth development. You can find these posts on my sister site www.lifeskillshandbooks.com. Please sign up to get the regular alerts.

As part of the process of developing these M&E materials, many practitioners from all over the world met in Zurich to look at them and comment and give feedback. Then some of them went away and trialled the activities. The result is at least a first attempt at putting together a toolkit that folks at field level will find easy to understand and useful.

The toolkit comes with a warning however. Like with ALL tool kits they are a STARTING point for you only. They are for you to ADAPT and change and undoubtedly IMPROVE upon!

I would be so grateful to any of you readers who are doing such great work to comment on the posts and add your own links and ideas in the comment box for us all to share. This community is 700+ strong and growing every day, so it is becoming a great network for us all to utilise.

Enjoy and get in touch! If you don't want to comment publicly then please be in touch with me directly if you have any questions or comments.

Evaluating Learning Networks

Do learning networks really make any difference?

Do people ever apply what they have learnt?

And how does this help the poorest people we are trying to assist?

Throughout my career in international development I have had an interest in strengthening and developing networks of individuals and organisations to enable them to better promote life skills work and children’s participation work across their projects. Even before the incredible communications technology we have now, these networks played an important part in helping people to develop their practice, to learn from others’ practice, to make contacts with others who can help them build good practice, find funding partners and find good, affordable (or free!) resources.

Anyone who has been involved in networking knows its value but can often struggle to point at how and why and, as a result it can be hard to secure funding for it. This means that the networking type of activities are either minimized or the time to do them paid form the very limited pot of funds allocated for ‘administration’  - notoriously the hardest pot to fill!

If we could get better in describing and then in monitoring and evaluating our networking activities in all their variety – then this might help with securing the funding this precious activity deserves.

Recently, I discovered this short paper by Rick James on the website of INTRAC (International NGO and research center) about Monitoring and Evaluating Learning Networks. In this paper he sets out relatively simple, ‘good enough’ ways to monitor and evaluate networking activities. He describes how, with considered planning and sensible methods, it is possible to generate reasonably good data, certainly good enough to indicate a positive contribution to development.  

 

Exciting news: Toolkit on Monitoring and Evaluating Lifeskills for Youth Development

Exciting news! The Jacobs Foundation guidelines and toolkit on Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills For Youth Development is ONLINE and FREE. I have been involved in the creation of the two volumes Click here for their section on publications where you can download the document.

If you want to read more about it, here is an extract from the forward....

JACOBS FOUNDATION AND A FOCUS ON LIFE SKILLS
The mission of the Jacobs Foundation is to foster children and youth development. It does this by supporting institutions and projects that contribute to the welfare, social productivity, and social inclusion of current and future generations of young people by understanding and promoting their personal

The Monitoring and Evaluation of Life Skills

In my work on M& E with the Jacobs Foundation I have been pleased to come across the work of 'Edgework'. This is an organisation who works with NGO's amoung others and in particuler looking at innovative ways to embed life skills into sports progrmames and camp experiences specifically for children and youth who are especially vulnerable. Summaries of the impact they have had can be read here. Also on their website are tools and resources that can be used to support the monitoring and evalution of Life Skills. In addition, they include one or two tools that relate to specific Sport for Development projects. lastly they have posted a short manual on some games that help promote conversations about resilience.