Focusing on women to enhance development impact : Save the Children's woman-child impact program final evaluation : cooperative agreement no. PDC-0158-A-00-1058-00

Evaluation covered the period 9/91-12/95 vs. a 12/96 PACD. Efforts to strengthen program planning, evaluation, and technical support in SC/Westport has been impressive. Women's literacy, children's basic education, and women's micro-credit activities have been strengthened or created in all core countries. The Group Guaranteed Lending and Savings (GGLS) groups, introduced and supported in Mali, Bolivia, and Haiti through WCI, have been immensely successful, and have expanded rapidly in number, particularly in the last year. The use of WCI funds to strengthen program planning and develop staff skills, as well as to provide TA to both core and non-core countries, has been impressive. No fewer than 164 technical events have been funded by WCI home office monies since 10/91. The WCI regional resource-sharing funds have also been employed to conduct program planning, training, baseline and evaluation surveys, cross-country program exchange, conduct workshops on gender and empowerment issues, and provide TA. Some 68 regional resource-sharing funding activities have been carried out to date in 29 countries. All WCI core countries have successfully developed clusters of integrated sectoral interventions. This has been done by adding sectoral interventions to the basic maternal/child health activities already underway. In most cases, the women's health groups served as a base for literacy, empowerment, and credit activities. The planned innovative basic education programs have been initiated in Mali, Haiti, and Bolivia, most successfully in the village schools in Mali. On the down side, the development of an agency-wide management and organizational development system and training programs, including the design and implementation of training cycles for local staff in core countries, has not proceeded as rapidly as expected. Also, in the absence of more frequent visits to core countries by the WCI training coordinator, training cycles have not been developed for staff, although numerous cycles are employed in the sectoral programs for male and female program participants. Training of staff in core country programs has been ad hoc. However, the eight regional training teams established at the 5/95 Family and Community Empowerment Training Systems (FACETS) workshop have now begun to implement their training plans. Originally trained in gender analysis, these teams will eventually conduct training in all SC guiding principles and in key technical skills for field office staff. Objective measurement of program impact has been problematic in all core countries, in spite of visits to each country by the home-based WCI evaluation specialist. Measuring the impact on women and children of SC's programs is complicated by the need to define impact indicators. Further, despite awareness of the need to measure an integrated cluster of sectoral impacts, the lack of an integrated data base and a statistical package to manipulate such data continues to be a failing in all core country programs. In addition, documentation in the field appears insufficiently developed, although Bangladesh has made greater strides than the other core countries. The WCI Unit in Westport has produced an important set of monographs and working and occasional papers, but much more could be drawn from the collective experience. Efforts to establish partnerships with local institutions, while pursued in all countries, have made only modest progress, except in Bangladesh and to some degree in Mali. In particular, the methodology of developing local partners' institutional capacity to take over many of SC's functions as SC "phases over" to new zones is not yet sufficiently developed. Gender sensitization has been successfully pursued by the WCI staff, especially in the last year since the arrival of the new WCI Unit director. Each core country office has also actively pursued activities in women's empowerment -- a concept that remains unmeasured thus far and that is probably still unclear to many in SC. The planned establishment of new regional management and TA mechanisms has not made much progress. (Author abstract, modified)