Monitoring, Operations Research and Evaluation for Adaptive Programmes (MORE-AP)

  It has been long since i last posted. I want to share top online courses that can boost your career by giving you cutting edge skills needed in today's work. With increased focus on optimization and business intelligence, the demand for skills in analytics will continue to increase. As young people starting your careers, you need to focus on what is changing and what recruiters are looking for. When you land on any job advert, try to identify skills they are looking for and compare with what you have. Then you can look up for ways of skilling yourself.  Here are my top courses on Udemy that you can complete and get those needed skills.  My selection is based on the skills that being sought after in job adverts for business analysts, program analysts, and Monitoring and Evaluation specialists.   I will be sharing a list for Coursera later in the week.  Excel Data Analysis For Dummies.  For the beginners, this is the must go to course. Excel is the number-one spreadsheet applicatio

RTI International’s Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, Learning, and Adapting cycle.  Source:  RTI Colleagues at  RTI   have developed, tested and implemented Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, Learning, and Adapting (MERLA). They have documented added value of MERLA in ensuring effective management and effectiveness of projects and programmes.  They have a course that can help you learn more amount the framework and its application in programming.   You can also read more about the MERLA approach from a published article by RTI . 

   Am sure you have seen the adverts everywhere looking for an evaluation consultant or evaluator.  All of them in whatever sector, field, context or organization, they always say what they are looking for in an evaluator. All adverts for evaluators will mention  "experience of designing and conducting evaluations",  "Strong analytical skills",  "ability to work with and as a part of teams",  "excellent report-writing and editing skills",  "Excellent data presentation and visualization skills" , etc. All this points to competencies required of an evaluator. Several articles and resources on  skills needed to be an evaluator exist , in most cases grouped together with skills for monitoring. Today, I will be highlighting the competencies you need to develop to be a very good and agile evaluator. The beauty of evaluation is that it builds on other professions with few modifications in the applicability of competencies.  For example, if y

  Once you have a program or project, we assume everything that needs to be done is clear and clear to everyone.   However, there is always no dull moment for Monitoring and Evaluation nerds. You have all those figures in the project document and your job is to make sure everyone knows the best way to get those figures or to get to them (achieve them).   That is target setting. For the sake of this blog, I keep monitoring and evaluation together, mainly because it is usually the same individual or team responsible for both roles. Indicators are what drives monitoring. But targets will decide how monitoring will be done, how results will be interpreted, and how success will be celebrated. But it is worth knowing wrong targets may point to issues related to limited understanding of the intervention the target beneficiaries. We have all been in a place where our tasks included everyone asking you to set targets every year. And they even emphasize, targets that are ambitious and re

This Nigerian proverb  is an excellent explanation that to achieve desired process, you need to factor in the dosage. I was made to believe that Dosage = dose x time +/- other factors. But treatment outcomes may not appear because the dose has been completed. There are other factors that must come into play such as underlying conditions, nutrition,  etcetera.      Back to the case of the famer and the goat.  The assessment showed that fat goats could easily be sold or sold at a better price because it was what everyone wants to buy. Also the assessment by the famer showed that the goat was not fat. This is what needs assessment and context analysis does. It clears the ground for expected results to be clarified and a plan to achieve them developed.   we will assuming the farmer knows  what makes a goat fat, the goat likes it and actually eats enough, ......  However, being already a market day, the farmer was faced with a dilemma of  getting a lowest price or not selling at all. But al

The truth is that you need certification, to prove that you have been thoroughly tested and proved to have understanding of what monitoring and evaluation is.  However, employers when recruiting for M&E positions, they are looking for skills, not certification.  invest much time in acquiring skills as you would in acquiring certification.  A quick look at various job adverts, they always appear to look for individuals that can: develop and implement an M&E or MEAL strategy and/or implementation plan; advise on evaluation approaches and methods relevant to a program context; conduct statistical  analysis or has basic understanding of data analysis- usually requires basic skills in  SPSS, R, SAS, or Stata; design  and manage studies and researches -  knowing how to use K obo Toolbox, Qualtrics, CommCare, CSPro or any others surveying software; convincingly present technical information to non technical audience - because M&E is aimed at informing decision making and not all d

Usually this is a question i get asked every time i meet a university graduate or someone that feel they want a change in career. I personally got to into the field through on job training. I attended a training on Leadership for Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (ASRH) organized by Partners in Population and Development in 2003 in Mukono, Uganda. In this training, monitoring and evaluation were introduced as concepts for good programming, and a key role they play.  This served only as an awareness to know that something called M&E exists and i could easily tell everyone a difference between monitoring and evaluation. This was so easy because there was that table that was always shown during trainings about how the two differ.   This raised my interest and decided to read more about M&E and that is how the door opened and my career started in the field. During that period, by just having a line in the CV that said M&E actually could get you an job to perform the rol