Thursday 16 August 2012

Q4C in the field - now back online

Quest4Change is back on line, you'll be excited to hear, after a small detour to Kenya for a bit of sand dam action.....

Celebrating the dam and Usain Bolt's incredible victories
  
Rose, the resident Q4C blogger and fundraiser, spent 6 weeks back  leading a Kenya Water Relief team to a series of successes....

Over 5 weeks of project work, we:
  • Extended one large dam built at Malaika in 2010
  • Helped to beat the world cement-mixing record of 300 bags in one day at Kasyelia
  • And got oh-so-close to completing one of the largest sand dams ever attempted by Quest volunteers, with Kipico Self-Help Group. 
Read a bit more about our travails here.

One of the things we're doing more and more and Q4C is to monitor & evaluate our impact. All fairly dull words, but so important if we are to make sure the work is really having the positive effects we believe it is (and not having any negative ones!).  Hence the fabulous Gemma's transformation from charity intern to World of Difference winner and Monitoring & Evaluation Strategist extraordinaire.

All project leaders and volunteers this year have been involved in a number of exercises with local community members to measure our impact - and to work out which tools will be the best for continuing to monitor this.

Consequence Chain
Doing a Consequence Chain (see picture above) threw up some interesting sand dam impacts of which we hadn't thought here in the Quest office, so it was definitely a worthwhile exercise to do. A Consequence Chain is something that maps perceived impact as a series of subsequent effects, and is a very simple tool to both use and explain.

We asked several members of the Kipico Self Help Group what they believed the impacts of the sand dam they were completing would be for the community - originally drawn on an empty cement bag (!), here are the results from Kipico Self-Help Group members this year: 

CLICK HERE FOR LARGER IMAGE
  
At the end of the year, we'll be producing our Annual Impact Report once again, so watch this space....

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