Tag: humanitarian aid

Participatory Impact Assessment: a Guide for Practitioners

The Feinstein International Center has been developing and adapting participatory approaches to measure the impact of livelihoods based interventions since the early nineties. Drawing upon this experience, the guide aims to provide practitioners with a broad framework for carrying out project level Participatory Impact Assessments (PIA) of livelihoods interventions in the humanitarian sector. Other than in some health, nutrition, and water interventions in which indicators of project performance should relate to international standards, for many interventions there are no ‘gold standards’ for measuring project impact. This guide aims to bridge this gap by outlining a tried and tested approach to measuring the impact of livelihoods projects. The tools in the guide have been field tested over the past two years in a major research effort, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and involving five major humanitarian NGOs working across Africa.

Download a PDF copy of the guide here

Evaluation of Humanitarian Action with ALNAP (Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action)

Date: 29-31 OCTOBER 2008
Venue: near Brussels
This course is an introductory-to- intermediate level course and has the overall aim of making evaluations of humanitarian action more effective in contributing to the improved performance of interventions and to improve the quality of the evaluation process. The course is facilitated by Channel Research, Margie Buchanan Smith and John Cosgrave. It will be held near Brussels (La Converserie).

Download Course Description | Download Application Form

Efficient linking of lists in humanitarian data management

“Aldo Benini has produced a technical note reviewing efficient ways of linking lists when the linkage variables (e.g. name of person, village) have significant spelling differences, or the lists are of different size.

Abstract: ”Relief workers sometimes have to match two or more lists of persons (food aid recipients, camp populations, missing persons, patients, etc.) or localities (villages of origin; populated places in two administrative gazetteers). The identifying information (name, address, document numbers) may be held in spreadsheets or databases, but may defy immediate matching, notably because of spelling differences. Automated record linkage procedures can speed up the process greatly while manual verification of dubious cases remains important. With lists obtained from a community empowerment program in Tanzania, I demonstrate how the linkage works, using one method in a popular spreadsheet application, and another in a statistical program.” – The paper can be downloaded from http://aldo-benini.org/Level2/humanitarian_data_analysis.htm. Continue reading “Efficient linking of lists in humanitarian data management”

Quality COMPAS and Dynamic COMPAS course organized by Groupe URD at its head office

(from Alnap email list)

Training Course (in English): The Dynamic COMPAS and the Quality COMPAS

(quality assurance method and software for humanitarian projects)

23 – 27 June 2008 in Plaisians (Provence)

The Quality COMPAS method and Dynamic COMPAS software are project and information management tools for humanitarian projects. They will be the subject of a short training course to be held in Plaisians (Groupe URD’s head office) from 23rd to 27th June 2008.

The course will be conducted in English.

Project and information management is essential to ensure the quality of humanitarian projects. Many of the weaknesses which have been identified in projects over the last decade do not come from a lack of technical knowledge on the part of humanitarian actors but rather because qualitative factors have not been properly taken into account.

Drawing its content from the COMPAS method, the course will cover subjects such as (1) conducting a situation analysis which goes further than a simple needs analysis, (2) designing a project beyond the logical framework, (3) defining objectives and indicators in keeping with all the quality criteria, (4) developing and implementing a monitoring system, (5) understanding the difference between monitoring and evaluation, etc.

The course is organised around a case study which gives participants practical experience of quality management and using the COMPAS method and the Dynamic COMPAS software (to download it and/or to know more about the COMPAS: http://www.compasqualite.org/en/index/index.php)

This course has been designed for national and international aid workers involved in project management activities like needs assessment, design, monitoring, self-evaluation and evaluation.

Do not hesitate to contact us for further information.

Pierre Brunet

Training Unit Coordinator

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