For many community organisers, volunteers, and program leads, Monitoring & Evaluation feels like a maze of frameworks, metrics, and technical jargon. But during the Africa Wiki Women, November Skill Up Workshop “Learning & Evaluation Made Simple” Led by Jessica Stephenson; Lead Learning and Evaluation Officer at Wikimedia Foundation, participants were made to realise that evaluation doesn’t have to be complicated. Rather it can be creative, intuitive, and even fun.

The session opened by grounding everyone in the understanding that: before anything can be measured, it is necessary to know what change one is trying to create.

Screenshot of presentation slide on “Theory of Change”during the workshop

To better solidify this, the theory of change was broken down:

• What’s the goal?
• What strategy will get you there?
• Why do you believe this approach will work?
• What do you want to learn along the way?
• And most importantly how will you know if you’re making progress?

The Cookie Challenge.

To bring the ideas to life, Jessica introduced an effective learning activity: the cookie challenge. In this interacting scenario, participants imagined running a community nutrition project using cookies. The exercise broke evaluation down into tangible pieces:

Activities: buying ingredients, baking, hosting a cookie session.

Assumptions: people will show up, they will try the recipe at home, ingredients are affordable.

Learning Questions: Did they enjoy the cookies? Did they learn? Will they continue baking them?

Evidence: number of participants, stories from the session, follow-up interviews, photos, and longer-term behaviour change: buying ingredients, baking, hosting a cookie session

The session also helped participants to be aware of tools that can make data collection easier especially for Wikimedia work. From PetScan and Baglama2, to the Hashtags Tool, Outreach Dashboard, EventMetrics, and light scripting with PAWS. Participants also undertook a 10 minutes exercise to develop a “theory of change” for a project they are running or an idea they have. After the exercise they were given an opportunity to share their result with the facilitator for feedbacks and input.

***Screenshot showing some participants during the AWW November Skill Up Workshop ***

It’s Not Just About Numbers

Another big takeaway was the importance of qualitative evidence. Numbers indeed tell what happened, but stories reveal why it happened. Participants learnt how testimonies, photos, short videos, and reflective interviews can capture dimensions of impact that metrics can’t.

The session wrapped with guidance on the often-forgotten side of evaluation: resourcing and teamwork.

• Scheduled check-in moments
• Budget lines for monitoring activities
• Time for Reflection
• people who know how to gather, analyse, and document insights.

One of the important recommendation was allocating a minimum of 10% of project budget to Learning & Evaluation. Because learning isn’t an extra it’s part of the work.

To get more insights that were sharing during the workshop, watch the full session on YouTube. Remember to follow the Africa Wiki Women YouTube channel by clicking the subscribe button.

Archive notice: This is an archived post from Wikimedia Space, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

Archive notice: This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.

Can you help us translate this article?

In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?

Start translation