Date: May 2 – July 22, 2010
Venue: Social Research Center of the American University in Cairo.

The Social Research Center of the American University in Cairo is pleased to announce the 9^th round of the training course “Research Methods for Guiding Policy and Evaluation with Special Application to Population and Health”. The three-month training course is directed to Arab nationals and will be held during May 2 – July 22, 2010 at the Social Research Center of the American University in Cairo.

The training course aims to acquaint participants with principles of research methods and its application in the field of population and health.

The course consists of four separate but complementary training modules:

More details are available at the training website. http://www1.aucegypt.edu/src/rm/ .

The tuition fee for the course is EGP 18,000 and does not include living and travel expenses. Applicants needing financial support to cover tuition and/or living expenses are advised to approach donors, international and regional agencies. Limited full and partial scholarships are offered by the Social Research Center on highly competitive basis and are funded by Wellcome Trust and Hewlett Foundation.

A selection committee will be meeting in February 2010 to select the eligible trainees for the training course. The accepted applicants will be informed of the committee’s decision during the first week of March, 2010.

Applicants should complete the attached application form and return it no later than January 31, 2010 by: e-mail to: rm@aucegypt.edu or completed, mail to: Research Methods Training Coordinator, Social Research Center, the American University in Cairo, Research Centers Building, AUC Avenue, P.O. Box 74 , New Cairo 11835, Egypt. Phone: +20.2.2615.1441/1440/1315

Date: 28 Sep, 2009 to 16 Oct, 2009
Venue: University of Pretoria, Hatfield

Full Details:
This course introduces delegates to the monitoring and evaluation of health programmes, the improvement and institutionalisation of the collection of health related data and the analysis of programme planning and perfomance.

The main topics covered include the development of monitoring and evaluation programmes for population, health and nutrition interventions (HIV/AIDS, STDs, TB, family planning an dreproductive health).

Cost per Delegate: R16500

For more information, please visit http://www.ceatup.co.za or contact Thabang from Continuing Education at the University of Pretoria on telephone 0124205010 or email thabang.ce@up.ac.za.

Date: October 5 – 16, 2009
Venue:  Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi, India

USAID’s MEASURE Evaluation Project is pleased to announce the regional workshop on “Impact Evaluation of Population, Health and Nutrition Programs,” for English speaking professionals. The workshop is sponsored by the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), New Delhi, India in collaboration with MEASURE Evaluation. The two-week course will be held October 5 – 16, 2009 in New Delhi, India.

Taught in English, the course is designed for mid-level health and population researchers, administrators, program managers, and other professionals involved in the implementation and evaluation of population, health and nutrition programs. The course provides intensive, hands-on training in impact evaluation with an emphasis on statistical methods for professionals currently involved in related activities.

The total course fee for the workshop is $6200. The total course fee includes the workshop tuition, accommodation, partial board (breakfast daily and lunch on weekdays), and round-trip airport transfers .These costs do not include airfare, visa fees, or other expenses.

Applications must be submitted to PHFI by July 10, 2009. *

A limited number of MEASURE Evaluation fellowships are available to qualified students.*

Please find a brochure and application materials attached. This announcement is not only intended to serve as a means of informing you of the availability of the program, but also to ask for referrals of applicants. There may be promising employees working in monitoring and evaluation of PHN programs who would be able to increase their contributions to this field in your country by enhancing their M&E skills by attending this. We would appreciate your forwarding this announcement to potential applicants.

For more information, contact the MEASURE Evaluation Training Officer:email: measure_training@unc.edu or fax: (919) 966-2391,

or visit MEASURE Evaluation’s website at www.cpc.unc.edu/measure click on “training”

The Food and Nutrition Technical Assistance (FANTA) Project is pleased to announce the release of A Guide to Monitoring and Evaluation of Nutrition Assessment, Education and Counseling of People Living With HIV. The guide provides guidance and tools to support programs in monitoring and evaluating nutrition interventions for people living with HIV government health system staff who are responsible for designing and implementing M&E systems. The guide can be used to select indicators, set targets, plan data collection and tabulation processes and interpret and use the information obtained.

Support for this guide was provided by USAID/East Africa and USAID’s Bureau for Global Health’s Office of Health, Infectious Disease and Nutrition.

The guide can be downloaded from FANTA’s website at www.fantaproject.org.

M&E Fundamentals is a two-hour self-instructional Web course that covers the basics of program monitoring and evaluation (M&E) in the context of population, health and nutrition programs. It also defines common terms and discusses why M&E is essential for program management.

This course is designed for individuals as a self-guided resource, but it is also useful for learning or reviewing basic factual information before or during a traditional in-person training event.

To take this free course:
Go to http://www.cpc.unc.edu/measure/training/mentor and select “Interactive mini-course on M&E Fundamentals”

For more information about MEASURE Evaluation training materials and workshops, please visit www.cpc.unc.edu/measure/training.

See also on the MandE NEWS website

• SlideShare presentations on Monitoring and Evaluation
• Online M&E training: Additional sources

What is it?

STEPS is a program planning, monitoring, and evaluation (M&E) toolkit intended for organizations that address sexual and reproductive health and rights. STEPS is a project of Margaret Sanger Center International (MSCI) at Planned Parenthood of New York City (PPNYC) and began as a collaboration between MSCI/ PPNYC and the International Planned Parenthood Federation/ Western Hemisphere Region. The development of the STEPS toolkit has been supported by funding from the Ford Foundation and the World Bank’s reproductive health program. STEPS is available free of charge, in both English and Spanish, on the Internet (at www.stepstoolkit.org) and on CD-ROM.

Why was it developed?

STEPS grew out of a shift in international development goals, from a narrow focus on family planning services and population control, to a broader rights-based social justice perspective on sexual and reproductive health (SRH) that emphasized empowering women and gender equality. This shift was embodied in the Cairo Consensus, the plan of action ratified by 180 countries that participated in the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development. The shift is also apparent in the eight inter-linked Millennium Development Goals that were approved by 189 United Nations member states in 2000 with the aim of eradicating poverty. Gender equality and women’s empowerment are essential aspects of the Cairo Consensus and the Millenium Development Goals As rights-based SRH programs proliferated, organizations noted a lack of accessible tools that could help them to design and implement effective programs and evaluate them systematically. Existing materials did not offer ways of assessing progress toward hard-to-measure goals such as women’s empowerment, gender equality, and healthy sexuality. In addition, organizations and funders wanted to have a collective body of evidence, gleaned from evaluations, that could be used to advocate for expanded
programming. We created STEPS to respond to these needs.

What can STEPS help you to do?

STEPS makes the program process a continual cycle of learning, improvement, and accountability. STEPS can help organizations to develop and evaluate rights- based social justice interventions by showing program planners how to break down complex social and health concepts, such as
women’s empowerment, into measurable and locally relevant components that can be the basis for programming and evaluation. STEPS emphasizes self-learning in order to make M&E a meaningful and continuous  aspect of the program process. It requires those who are most familiar with the program – those who directly provide services and the recipients of those services – to actively participate in M&E. STEPS employs the widely used causal pathway and the Logical Framework Approach (LFA). STEPS explains these tools and how to use them in a way that is responsive to the realities
of program development and implementation. Learning through STEPS how to apply the causal pathway and LFA can help organizations to  communicate more effectively with funders, who are increasingly asking for program work to be developed and evaluated in these frameworks.

See a slideshow presentation on STEPS Toolkit

Operating systems:

• MS Windows 98SE
• MS Windows 2000
• MS Windows XP (Service packs 1&2)
• Apple Macintosh OSX 10.2 +

Browsers for MS Windows, for Flash version

• Internet Explorer 5, 5.5, 6
• Mozilla 1.x
• Mozilla FireFox 1.x
• Netscape 6.x
• Opera 7.5.x

Case study 1, Andhra Pradesh, India : improving health services through community score cards
MISRA, Vivek et al , August 2007

This eight page note summarises the findings, processes, concerns, and lessons learned from a project in Andhra Pradesh – one of six pilot projects aimed at the application of specific social accountability tools in different contexts of service delivery