August 17, 2016

It’s been a busy month of August for the Full Circle Program. A lot took place this month…luckily, we managed to accomplish everything planned! The FC Program planned to evaluate the PDS piloting program after a year and a half of implementation. We want to measure the impact of the PDS classes to the piloted schools. We had 10 pilot schools from Meru district, but for this evaluation to be effective, we also needed to compare these 10 schools with some of the control schools so we can correctly understand the evaluation.

It took a week and some days to develop evaluation tools and methodologies that will be applicable for the whole process. All these were sent to a monitoring and evaluation expert, our former Country Director Ken Oulu who is still involved in this, to review and modify before our final editing. Ken came up with the evaluation framework, which will act as the guide, and we agreed on tools and methodologies. This evaluation was specifically for students, PDS class teachers, head of schools, ward education coordinators and district officials.

We used questionnaires and focus group discussion for students. The questions asked were the same at both treatment schools and controlled schools. For teachers and district officials, we used key informative interviews. Questions differed for those at the piloting schools and at control schools.

A group of seven people ready to put their mind and brain for this activity were trained intensively on data collection for two days. It took us five days to collect data from nine schools. Lucky the data collectors were well trained and well prepared for this activity. Teachers and students gave us maximum cooperation in carrying out the evaluations.

I am here at the office cleaning the data, analyzing the data, entering the collected data into spreadsheets, and writing an overall report which will give us feedback of PDS project implementation. I hope you will all love to hear how this intervention has enabled students to learn effective life skills education. Also this will help us to see the support of TFFT’s Full Circle Program in teaching essential life skills to Tanzanian students.

Stay tuned for the evaluation results and report!