What are practical impact measuring, and M&E & Training tracking tools you would recommend?

Daniel

Thank you very much for your response, for the links, and for your kind offer to help.

Our UK registered Non-Profit has several projects in 3 African Countries. (http://ripplesfoundation.ngo/index.php#.).

We've supported over 5,000 women to date, and currently working on multiple projects in many villages: ripplesfoundation.ngo/women-enterprise.php#.

The main focus is on offering micro-finance to poor African village women to set up small businesses which they run themself. We offer training, and support, and carry out audits. The aim is to set up scalable sustainable businesses with high impact levels in the reduction of poverty, and monitor the impact on gender and social issues.

We want to be able to measure several impact levels, across projects, processes, countries and demographics.

Resources we plan to unlock: Skilled African village women able to set up small business

Population who will benefit: Low income African village women living on less than a$/day, with no access to capital.

Ratio of resource to individual: Given the environment, I'll need some clarification.

Pls let me know if you need more information; I can leave my e-mail address if required, thanks again for helping.

Best

Anne

I'm curious about the benchmarking you may have done (or continue to do) throughout the process. Off the top of my head, since you are training women in business it seems like a good opportunity to integrate self-assessment tactics into their everyday routines. While the business owner may not realize the significance of tracking how many meals they were able to serve or how much food was saved from going to waste - if you track minutia details like that they will serve as detailed data visualizations using a tool like Silk or Tableau. 

I would also think about the phases each woman goes through - if you already have impacted 5,000+ humans then I'm sure you have outlined some type of process for delivering the services and resources to your population. When you look at that supply chain of resources, the stakeholders that need to be involved, the mental state the woman are in on day 1 vs day 30 vs day 90...do you notice any changes in how the women feel about themselves? Your innovation empowers them with the opportunity to generate revenue through a business...but I would focus a lot of my attention on how that small business is impacting the woman's emotional well being. Dignity. Confidence. Agency. If you were to assess the woman in the beginning by asking them to answer a few questions which would allude to how they thought about themselves it could give you a benchmark - 30/60/90/180 days later you can continue asking those few questions. If the verbalizing of the q&a is difficult for some of the women then give them journals to write in because it scales better for you. after these women go through a serious social, emotional, and spiritual journey because of your program (and you made sure to point out to them the importance of the process and indicating their progress) then they would potentially begin to evolve much further past "the old life" which you gave them tools to climb out of.

Finally, once the women reach that stage I'm sure you can see the value in bringing in the next cohort so that the previous cohort may begin mentoring for you. now you have business owner and apprentice/mentor in a multi-sided marketplace who sustain the program on their own - you would be able to look down from above and tweak things based on the self-assessments happening in real-time on the ground floor. 

I ended up going off a little bit with some other ideas up there...but hopefully something is useful!

We currently audit the enterprise projects monthly, and monitor some of the areas you've suggested.  We'll definitely be applying all your suggestions thank you very much.

And the links were awesome Blabs will make a huge difference to our M&E thank you.

All the best, and thanks for helping.

Anne