USAID/South Sudan Monitoring and Evaluation Support Project FY 2021 Quarter 3 Performance Report

The report outlines the project's activities and accomplishments under three components: Performance Monitoring and Reporting; Support for Evaluations, Assessments, and Special Studies; and Strategic Communications. Since its inception in October 2019, MESP TO 4 has provided management and administrative support to the USAID/South Sudan Mission. However, in the second quarter of FY2021, the scope of the task order was revised to shift resources toward implementation of the baseline household survey, GIS mapping support, and remote third-party monitoring (RTPM) of USAID/South Sudan activities. During the period under review, MESP generated geographic maps for the Mission to understand the spatial distribution of activities implemented by USAID and other donors. The maps depicted Policy Link expansion in Jur River, Budi, Kapoeta North, and Akobo; presence of USAID/South Sudan IPs at payam level in the 13 target counties; administrative boundaries of bomas and payams including the relevant topographic features; and distribution of USAID IPs in the 13 target counties. MESP monitored 69 OHA-supported interventions for nutrition and warehouse management in Tonj North, Kapoeta South, and Kapoeta East Counties. In support of the Mission's Collaboration, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) agenda, MESP submitted field debrief notes from the three counties and delivered a debrief presentation to OHA and their implementing partners (IPs). During the debrief, OHA and the IPs acknowledged the usefulness of TPM data in highlighting successes and bottlenecks and providing evidence for strategic decision making. Following successful piloting of the Household Survey data collection instrument in April 2021, MESP revised the tool and organized a refresher training for the supervisors to prepare them for the rollout. The supervisors deployed to the selected counties in May 2021, where they identified, recruited, and trained 102 enumerators. As of June 30, MESP was concluding data collection in all the six phase-one counties after successfully collecting data from 37 enumeration areas per county. The project's key accomplishments include generating maps as requested by the Mission, monitoring 69 OHA-supported interventions, delivering a debrief presentation to OHA and their IPs, holding a debrief with the Mission's Front Office, and collecting household survey data in all the six phase-one counties. However, the project faced several challenges, including field trips for TPM that could not be conducted due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and SOW parameters, poor phone network coverage that restricted RTPM data collection, limitations in internet and mobile connectivity that posed challenges for coordination, security, and syncing of data for the household survey, poor road conditions and security threats that required adaptations to the data collection schedule, and identification of EA boundaries that proved to be a challenge in some areas. The project recommends that following the execution of the modification, MESP should meet with cognizant technical officers at USAID/South Sudan to review each of the four technical components of the modified scope of work.