Life Skills Handbooks

Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills 3/15: DEFINITIONS OF M&E

For those of you conducting life skills activities or life skills training with young people or adult facilitators, Here is number 3 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!

Monitoring

Monitoring is about tracking a project or aspects of a project and checking the achievement of milestones along the way. It is about the on-going gathering of information and therefore an important part of evaluation. At the start of the project you have to ask yourself. What do you want to keep track of and why? Then you need to ask how you will do this.

For example, at its most simple, taking a register of attendance at a life skills session is monitoring. Slightly more advanced would be to ask participants a question or a number of questions before and after the session and record their answers or have a show of hands about what (or how) the participants have learned. This gives you an idea of whether your key messages are being understood. This is monitoring.

Monitoring happens throughout the life of a project. For example, there may be a project that takes place over the course of one year and features life skills sessions conducted each week. Monitoring is about understanding what is happening in those weekly sessions and how it is happening. This information gathered is useful to and ‘feeds’ evaluation.

Monitoring is therefore a part of the basic project activity and is usually conducted by the project staff.
Regular monitoring enables project staff to learn and to feed that learning back into their approach and activities on an on-going basis.

Evaluation

Evaluation is also about asking questions and finding out about aspects of a project’s progress, achievements and results. There are...

Life Skills: Definitions, Ideas, Resources

I am thrilled that so many folks have downloaded The Life Skills Handbook from the site
www.lifeskillshandbooks.com and I am getting some great comments too. So glad its useful...

So what are life skills and how can they meet the needs of children and young people?

What are Life Skills?

In The Life Skills handbook we are guided by the World Health Organisation's definition of lifeskills

 “Life skills are abilities that help us to adapt and behave positively so that we
can deal effectively with the challenges of everyday life.”

Using this definition, we can separate the life skills from the other types of skills, like this:

Life skills: Decision-making, goal setting, problem-solving, coping with stress, coping with emotions, negotiating, friendship, interpersonal relationships, empathy (concern for others), critical thinking, creative thinking, resisting peer pressure, assertiveness
Livelihood skills: Time management, getting a job, interview, computer, cooking, driving etc
Learning skills: Reading, reporting, numeracy etc
Technical/health skills: Cleaning teeth, condom, road safety, giving oral rehydration etc
Outcomes of life skills: Teamwork, self-esteem, learning from each other, confidence etc

The most important life skills are grouped into five related areas. They are called the core skills. Here is a list of the areas and one example of how each core skill is developed in a life skills session:

The five core life skills and examples of a life skills activity

1.  Decision-making and problem- solving

- A group of children decide with the educator to give up smoking and help others do the same. They set goals to encourage themselves and each other and try to think what problems and benefits may hap

- A group of older boys shout at and threaten two girls. The girls have to work out whose help to seek if this happens again.

2.    Critical thinking & Creative thinking     

- A girl is able to assess the risks involved in accepting an invitation from a male stranger to accept a lift across the town.

- A young person is able to think about different future job options and to think how to work towards these options

3.    Communication & Interpersonal relationships   

- A child is able to discuss problems with parents or an appropriate adult

- A child is able to resist peer pressure when his friends ridicule his refusal to drink alcohol

4    Self-awareness and empathy

- A young woman develops an awareness of her sexual feeling and how these feelings can 'take over' sensible decisions. This awareness helps her avoid situations where she might risk unsafe sex.

- A group of children think about how they can help a disabled child who is alone a lot.

5    Coping with Stress &  Emotion   

- A child leans how to cope with the conflicting pressures of needing to work and wanting to study

- A boy learns to cope with the anger he feels towards his abusive father

How does this resonate with other definitions you know? Please let me know and come back or the next section on why and how life skills projects succeed and fail... 

For those who are working in the area of sexuality and life skills for young people...take a look at this excellent series, Our Future,  from the Aids Alliance. These resources were designed for use in Zambia and provide an excellent blue print for other countries.