Step 2: Improving your Program

Rationale

The most important role of your findings is to improve your program or develop new programs. They can:

tell you if your program is functioning at its best
if you are having the results you wanted

Important: Thorough analysis of your findings will lead you back to your needs assessment through a process of organizational self-reflection and program improvement.

Task 1: Reflect on the Rights-based Social Justice approaches and ask what you have learned about each of them in relation to the program

What have you learned about?

• protecting and fulfilling people’s rights and obstacles that need to be overcome
• ways to meet people’s sexual and reproductive health care needs on their own terms and from a holistic perspective
• what strategies worked to modify gender power dynamics and what obstacles will you still have to overcome
• the challenges of trying to promote a healthy sexuality approach with the age groups you were working and how to overcome them
• the importance of participation of women’s and other community groups to the content and quality of the program
• effective strategies for working with marginalized and/or vulnerable groups? How did this work influence the other work done by your agency and the other groups you work with?

Task 2: Plan how to make program modifications

=> Work with your M&E Team together with your agency’s program planning teams to fill out the Program Improvement Worksheet which will provide guidance for making the kinds of changes that will help you become even more effective.

Worksheet: Program Improvement

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Consider each of these areas:

• New insights on your understanding of the SRHR problem your program is addressing and your Theory of Change
• Modifications in your program’s Causal Pathway
• Re-assessment of your program’s goal(s)
• Re-assessment of needed changes, i.e. immediate and intermediate results, before your program can have the final results it is working towards
• Adjustments in activities and population served
• Strategic decisions about how your program or modifications of it are implemented
• Assessment of inputs
• Implications for public relations
• Implications for your agency as a whole
• Implications concerning the search for new donors

 

=> Set up regular meetings to work through this process and establish specific action plans to address all the findings and recommendations.

=> If you worked with community stakeholders, report back to the community on changes you are implementing. This will help build

• goodwill toward the organization
• long-term partnerships with the community

Task 3: Use the findings to help design a new program

If your agency has decided to design a new program to address the same or similar goals, your M&E findings will be very valuable inputs.

=> Use them from the very beginning to:

• guide the understanding of the SRHR problem and help you create a complete Causal Pathway.
• design new activities
• undertake changes within the agency
• work more productively with the community

=> Plan your new M&E process from the beginning. When the program is still being planned, select your M&E Team to work with the program planners and follow all the STEPS from the beginning. It will be easier this time, but you will reap even greater benefits from starting at the beginning of the program cycle.

 

Task 4: Use the findings to find new donors

Whether or not you modify your current program or design a new one, you will probably want to find new donors to support your work. Although your M&E findings don’t guarantee you will find new funding, they do provide you with a much stronger basis from which to seek new support.

 

=> Search for donors who support broader issues such as women’s empowerment, gender equity promotion, human rights, social justice, etc. All of these issues are relevant to your work so you should be able to highlight the connections to show how your proposed work fits in with what the donor wants to achieve.

 

=> Use stories and testimonies to pull the donor into your topic and/or show the importance of your work.

=> Show how the program fits into the larger picture of efforts to achieve the final goal by describing in simple terms the logic of your Causal Pathway.

=> Concisely explain what the program has achieved in the past. You may want to create a bullet point list of achievements as a handout to leave with the donor.

=> Justify future directions by describing the findings, conclusions and recommendations that demonstrate the need for the proposed approach.

=> Describe how your agency has benefited from the M&E process and the program and the changes it has made to avoid problems, fill gaps and better implement its programs.

=> Highlight your willingness to make modifications in your work based on data: this shows commitment to having real impact and a willingness to learn and grow.

=> Give the donor reason to trust that you will be successful and that on-going M&E efforts will continue to guide the program’s good work and make it even better.