Ethiopia Field Program - Monitoring and Evaluation

Overview

Ethiopia in the last few years has undergone dizzying swings in its political environment, from a controlled one-party state to dramatic but short-lived reforms and optimism under new Prime Minister Abiy, returning to more repression and finally the civil conflict of the last year. Ethiopia also struggles with poverty, and remains ranked toward the bottom in human development indices in spite of having one of the pre-pandemic world’s fastest-growing economies, aspiring to reach “middle-income status.” Nevertheless, the country is one of the world’s oldest civilizations, with a fascinating history and unique culture. 

Politics and ethnic conflict dominate the country currently. Prime Minister Abiy appeared as a transformative leader, and his first years as head of government were filled with an optimism unseen in decades. Uppermost in this was his agenda of nurturing a “pan-Ethiopian” identity rather than the previous ethnic-centered “divide and conquer” governing mode. The new openness, however, also unleashed pent-up tensions, particularly around ethnic grievances. As protest grew, so did crackdowns and political tensions that could not be controlled. In Tigray, that has escalated to military conflict, with atrocities and war crimes reportedly committed.

This Ethiopia Field Program - Monitoring and Evaluation from The New School will be focused on Monitoring and Evaluation, specifically with two groups that we have worked with for more than a decade. The first is a national consortium of women’s microfinance groups, a project The New School has been involved with for a decade. These “Self-Help Groups” ostensibly form around small business development and income generation, but many of the women do not participate in those endeavors yet seem to reap benefits from group participation. The New School has been monitoring group members’ economic performance for five years, with significant success in raising women and their families out of poverty, and this year we would like to also do an in-depth examination of the non-financial benefits, conducting a quantitative survey on psychosocial benefits. 

The second organization is a child welfare agency that works with families living in multidimensional poverty, with interventions also in microenterprise and income generation, and also childhood education and a school nutritional program. We have conducted intensive M&E with this stakeholder group over the last few years. 

Monitoring and Evaluation is a systematic method of collecting and analyzing data on project impact and success, and a skill and profession that has developed into the development and nonprofit industry’s best means of determining results and effectiveness. We will follow Project Cycle Management and the Design phase in which the M&E system is set up, working on logical framework objectives and outcomes, attaching measurable indicators, and then collecting data. We will do this work with university peers from Addis Ababa University.

Project and Partner Organizations

Consortium of Self help group Approach Promoters (CoSAP) in Ethiopia — A national coalition of approximately 13,000 women’s groups  and upwards of 250,000 members. The New School began working with CoSAP through our International Field Program in 2010 and began monitoring self-help group members’ economic performance five years later.

Wide Horizons for Children — A child welfare agency that works with impoverished families in Sidama, Addis Ababa, and Tigray on children’s education, income generation, and microenterprise.

Addis Ababa University — Building on a successful collaboration last summer, we will again join a cohort of Ethiopian students to work together on data collection and analysis.