August 26, 2016

Today, TFFT alumni, Richard Augustino, shares an update with us about his experience evaluating our Happy and Sad Box project. The Happy and Sad Boxes are an approach established by our Psychosocial and Health Program in schools to offer children the opportunity to communicate and share their rights, and/or a violation of rights, as well as best practices happening at their school.

I am so happy to share with everyone how the Happy and Sad Boxes evaluation exercise went. Being a TFFT scholar and taking part in this exercise gives me a strong desire to talk about this. I always say that whatever TFFT gives me helps me keep growing in every aspect of my life. The opportunities that I come across because of TFFT are of great importance to me. They are very valuable to me.

I want to talk about the two weeks that we took to do the evaluation. We did a two-day training that helped my colleagues and me develop research skills. We applied these skills and the exercise was successful. This made our work in the field easier. It is a great privilege to be on this team to do an evaluation. During the evaluation, we did Focus Group Discussions with students and the community, and had the students answer questionnaires.

It is great to see TFFT do this evaluation. This helps show me TFFT’s amazing vision for the Happy and Sad Boxes. TFFT makes a remarkable impact in the Tanzanian communities it serves, and no one can ever erase that. Implementing a project and then evaluating it shows community members how serious TFFT is when it comes to providing the best.

It is so wonderful when someone introduces something and takes an extra step to do an evaluation. I believe that TFFT works for the best and wants to do a lot in the future, which is why it is important to measure the success of any projects. This is one of the best projects that I have ever come across, TFFT is doing a lot to safeguard children’s rights.

I think the TFFT does an amazing job. I know how challenging it is just running a project on children’s rights, and I appreciate the enormous effort put forth by TFFT.  It takes huge effort to organize the programs that TFFT runs.

I look forward to seeing what comes in the future and hope I’m around long enough to connect with even a small portion of what’s already in place.