Evaluation Time

Right now, I’m participating in an evaluation of our Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene programs in my area. Our organization has been working specifically in Watsan here since 2006. Because we work more in the “rehabilitation” phase of humanitarian work, we have to be cognizant of when we’ve reached specific goals and be proactive about monitoring when humanitarian standards have been met.
We’ve brought in a consultant to do the internal evaluation, and I’ve been helping him with many of the village meetings, just to get a better idea of how to do an assessment, but also to become even more knowledgeable about successes and not-so-successful programs. Visiting community after community after community, it’s so encouraging to see the culminating results of years of work. Latrine programs, biosand filter programs, borehole programs, hygiene promotion programs, rainwater harvesting programs for schools and clinics… And it’s also so encouraging to hear community members go back through the list of Watsan Manager names and various Medair Community Workers, of people who came before me. It just really impresses on me how human all of this work is. We are all working together here – staff members, far away headquarters staff, community members – and somehow, it’s not just about the latrines and boreholes…somehow, it’s just as much about connecting with people. It really is beautiful.
It’s really interesting, the little things you find out about how a program takes on a life of its own in each village. In one community, we were asking about the water from the rainwater harvesting tank, as we wanted to know how they use it. During the rainy season, many household members will come around to take the water from the tank…what do they do with it? Drink it? Well…in a manner of speaking, they drink it. Haha. They think it makes really special tea!! So they come to get the rainwater to use for making special tea. In another community, biosand filters were a little bit misunderstood…they weren’t being used for filtering the water. Instead, after we had done all the training and installation of the filters, the households emptied all the sand out of the concrete containers and just plain used them for water storage…a little bit different than what was planned, but…well, it’s just a lesson learned for next time. In another community, we had set up a Spare Parts Centre for supplying a remote area with spare parts for handpump repair. Communities collect money from their households when the handpump breaks and pay for their own replacement parts from the Spare Parts Centre. It was really neat to find out that the Spare Parts Centre had actually expanded their business to start supplying spare parts to villages not targeted by our organization…now that’s sustainability. Elsewhere, our hygiene promotion programs had actually encouraged community members to build their own latrines, even though that wasn’t a purpose of our program! In one school, they used to actually stop school at 11:30 am in the morning because they had no water for lunchtime and afternoon. Due to an extensive Rainwater Harvesting program over a couple of years, the school now stays open until 3:00 pm – WOW!
I’ll basically be focused on this evaluation for most of the month of December. The results will help guide our program strategy and village selection for the coming year or two. But, just wanted to update you on the fun times of evaluating :)