For those of you conducting life skills activities or life skills training with young people or adult facilitators. Here is 14 of 15 weekly posts on Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills. Each of them are extracted from the Toolkit I developed for the Jacobs Foundation with the help of many of their field partners and which you can download for FREE by clicking here. Please find the Lifeskills Toolkit half way down the page under the heading, Intervention and Application. If you wish to have a hard (printed) copy please contact me with a short description of your work and why you would like the hard copy. As always please comment on these posts and let's get a conversation going!
The toolkit sets out 12 steps for planning and implementing your project evaluation. In practice, the steps may not always flow from one to another. There will be some movement backwards and forwards and there may be a need to add to, take away from or change the order of steps. Each evaluation works differently as each evaluation and each project has its own unique purpose. The crucial thing is to plan evaluations which are useful, enjoyable and realistic given the amount of time and resources for the project and the expertise of those involved. Where it is helpful, an example is set out in shaded boxes below the general points for each step. Here is more on the last step, Step 12.
Step Twelve: COMMUNICATE
The final step is COMMUNICATE THE RESULTS of your evaluation. This may be in a report or a presentation or both. Evaluation is hard work involving the effort of many people. Time needs to be set aside to communicate and deal with the results internally and externally. Positive aspects of evaluation need to be recognised and rewarded, more challenging aspects built into new planning or training activities. It’s important to ensure there are enough resources to communicate the results and make best use of the results as the project goes forward.
The most important people to report to are the young people who took part in their evaluation and explaining what will be the outcome of the results irrespective of whether the results are positive or not. This demonstrates your respect for the young people, gives them an opportunity to comment on the results and maximizes the chances of their cooperation for future evaluation. Failing to feedback properly can lead to their reluctance to participate in future evaluation activities. Depending on the style of your report, you can develop a version specifically for young people that you can give to them.
Although this is the last step in the planning process, there is one more post to give you an overview of M&E tools and 12 tools to stimulate discussions wiht children and young people.
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