Evaluating… twice
When I started my internship, one of my first tasks was to evaluate, along with my colleagues, the conformity and quality of samples sent by potential suppliers to be part of the kits we distribute in case of emergency. These two kits are “Non-Food Item” and “WASH” type: the first one contains items for cooking, bedding, water jerry can, soap, while the second one is focused on items such as soap, buckets, but also underwear and loincloths used by women as periodical sanitary protection.
And as I was evaluating these items with my colleagues, and probably even more so as an expatriate coming from a Western country, I wondered if my evaluation really corresponded to the beneficiaries’ expectations. Indeed, these beneficiaries are mostly mothers of large families, living from subsistence farming in rural areas of the east of the country, far away from my own life… And what is reassuring is that others have thought about it before me.
In fact, a double evaluation is implemented to measure the satisfaction of the beneficiaries and to consider ways of improvement. First, an evaluation is done by the implementing partners themselves: the idea is to have the partners return to the beneficiary community and to interview a sample of people to understand not only the beneficiaries’ satisfaction with the distribution process, with the communication, with each of the items in the distributed kit, but also to observe the actual usefulness of the distributed objects.
This is the first evaluation. Then comes the second one, carried out by an external service provider, specialized in this type of activity. The questions are relatively similar, but the objective is slightly different since it is a matter of measuring in a more scientific way — with particular attention paid to the statistical representativeness of the sample — the satisfaction of the beneficiaries while having a third party look at the quality of the intervention of the implementing partner.
However, it is not always easy to reconcile the results of these two types of evaluation. However, they do allow us to identify trends and to consider concrete recommendations in terms of the quality of products distributed, the identification and distribution process, and the management of complaints. Indeed, accountability should not only be an afterthought but should be one of the major axes of implementation of the activities themselves. This accountability is all the more difficult to implement as it requires a real pedagogy to explain to the beneficiaries that they have rights, beyond the mere distribution of items useful to their daily life, and that the partners must respect certain rules (do no harm, attention to the vulnerability of the beneficiaries, equity, etc.).
