| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

WLP ADFM Evaluation

Page history last edited by Alexandra Pittman 13 years, 1 month ago

 

Alexandra Pittman, PhD. 2010. "A Summary of the 'Leading to Choices' Program Evaluation in Morocco: A Women’s Learning Partnership Training Curriculum.

 

This summary provides a short description of the methodological elements in the Women’s Learning Partnership’s (WLP) evaluation of their Leading to Choices (LTC) participatory leadership program. WLP commissioned an in-depth evaluation of the LTC program in 2005 to determine its mid-term impact when it was nearing its fifth year of implementation. Given WLP’s core values of democratic participation, inclusivity, and contextual adaptation, the organization wanted the evaluation to be developed in a similar participatory spirit. As such, an evaluation process was set out with a dual purpose—to build the evaluation capacity of WLP partners, Association Démocratique des Femmes du Maroc (ADFM) in Morocco and given their enhanced capacity, to pilot test a participatory evaluation approach for use across the WLP Partnership. 

 

The two-year evaluation, occurring from April 2005-April 2007, was jointly implemented by WLP and ADFM, facilitated by an evaluation expert.[1]The evaluation team used a theory of change approach to guide the LTC evaluation.  Theory of Change models are uniquely situated for more complex social change assessments as the aim is to understand how and in what ways changes have been fostered by making explicit underlying program assumptions, potential counterfactuals, and most importantly, the driving theories or pathways of why and how the organization expects change to occur. The evaluation framework is built around these elements and aims to test the extent to which we should expect changes to happen based on the implementation steps that occurred in a given program and its intended aims. Based on the mapping of the LTC program, the evaluation team was expecting to track changes in three different domains, including the implementation and facilitation of the program, the short-term conceptual impacts of the program, and the medium-to longer-term application impacts of the program. 

 

In order to systematically assess the impact of the LTC program on participants’ lives, the team used a diverse range of methods, including interviews, surveys, and participatory methods. There were three participant groups for comparative purposes. There was a past participant group (who took part in the LTC program between 2001 and 2004), a new participant group (who would take part in an LTC workshop in 2005) and a non-participant comparison group. All participants in the evaluation study were involved in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which focused on women’s issues at some level.

 

The evaluation was designed such that in Phase 1, new participants participated in an interview before they took part in a LTC training workshop to establish a baseline understanding of their conceptualizations of leadership. After completing the interview in April 2005, the new participant group took part in the two-day LTC workshop. After completing the leadership workshop, they were given a questionnaire to assess any immediate shifts that might have occurred directly after program participation. The same interview and questionnaire were given to both past and non-participants. Interviews focused on the conceptualization and practice of leadership in different spheres, including the family, professional, and nonprofit sectors and aimed to understand obstacles and opportunities to leadership. Questionnaires focused on the presence of different leadership skills, especially those highlighted through the training program, as well as the sample participant’s leadership identification and self-esteem.   In Phase II, in April 2006, all participant groups were re-interviewed and completed a similar questionnaire to assess the presence and longevity of shifts associated with the training workshop.  By better understanding the LTC workshop process, the strengths and weaknesses of the LTC program, and new participant’s level of engagement with the participatory leadership concepts before, during, and after the workshop, we gain deeper insight into the ways in which the LTC training program has and has not contributed to shifts in participants' atitudes, skills, and behaviors.  For full results and statistical values, please see the final evaluation report.

 

For a fuller description of the evaluation design and its results, see the full summary report.

 

Strengths:

 

 

  • The capacity building dimension embedded in the design and implementation phases was a unique value added to traditional models of evaluation where external evaluators are the primary implementers.
  • Multiple and diverse methods were used to capture diverse types of change.
  • The participatory and capacity building nature of the evaluation aligned with the organizational missions of the organizations, feeding into both organizational and programmatic alignment between mission and accountability strategies. 
  • There was a strong focus on assessment for programatic learning and strengthening, revealed by the assessment of actual workshop implementation, facilitation, as well as the program's immediate, short, and mid-term outcomes. 

 

Weaknesses (or not designed for):

 

 

  • A deeper focus on constraints, and the needs of the participants that faced those constraints would have contributed to stronger learning and programatic improvement. As many are now emphasizing, in alignment with our theories of change, we must also attent to "theories if constraints."
  • The model could have focused more deeply on capturing unexpected program outcomes. The planning phases did not set up mechanisms to adequately capture unintended consequences.  
 

 

[1]The six person evaluation team included five Moroccan women activists, Maria Ezzaouini, Rabèa Lemrini, Rabèa Mardi, Saïda Idrissi, and Samira Bikarden from ADFM and Alexandra Pittman. 

 

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.