Getting Prepared: Seven Key Lessons from Remote Community Visits

Getting Prepared: Seven Key Lessons from Remote Community Visits

Community Works and Ninti One visit Ngukurr to document key achievements of the Stronger Communities for Children program in Ngukurr. Pictured left to right: Ian Gumbula, Daphne Daniels, Kirsty McKellar.

Despite their remoteness, communities in hard-to-reach locations across the Northern Territory are receiving outside visitors as often as every week.

When I visited Ngukurr in Arnhem Land earlier this year, I was surprised to hear about the frequency with which consultants were visiting the community. Once a week or more, government staff, independent consultants and employees from private firms were flying in and out of Ngukurr, often staying for days at a time.

These visitors come to oversee projects their departments are funding, to monitor and evaluate progress and achievements, and to complete independent research or studies, and more. Many come to measure their deliverables, outputs, outcomes and impacts … however we know from our work in the sector that not all spend time considering how to engage with the community in a meaningful, respectful manner.

What struck me in Ngukurr was how appreciative people were around how we conducted our work, leading me to start asking questions about what other people were doing that was so different to our own practice. Below are seven lessons I drew from these conversations.

Check rules of entry

Check rules of entry for whether you need a visitor permit or pass to visit the community. You can find this information online through council or state and territory websites. Some of these communities have strict rules that you must follow. For instance, some remote Indigenous communities are dry communities where alcohol is prohibited.

Complete desktop research

Complete desktop research on demographics; know the Traditional Custodians and/or clan groups, what languages are spoken, the population and any other information that can better prepare you. Many of these details might look different upon arrival, but at least you’ll enter with some sense of the community make-up. You can find some of this information on the AITSIS website, the Australia Bureau of Statistics data website, and regional and local council websites.

Contact appropriate community members

Contact appropriate community members well in advance of the dates you’d like to visit. In some instances, this means connecting with Traditional Custodians, and in others, it could mean finding and speaking with key community leaders. Even better, plan your visit with a local consultant who knows the community and who the community knows and trusts.

Decide together on a suitable date

Decide together on a suitable date for the consultation to take place. Like anywhere, people appreciate being consulted on when they can meet and have time to be fully engaged in the conversation. I have seen situations where dates have been set by consultants, only to be completely rejected by a community because they were not discussed prior. People lead busy lives, and it’s unreasonable to expect communities or local organisations to give up their time at the drop of a hat. Find a time that works for the community. 

Come with an offering

Come with an offering, especially for group meetings such as Focus Group Discussions. An offering like lunch, snacks or tea and biscuits is usually appreciated and demonstrates you value and are thankful for the participants’ time and contribution.

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Remain flexible

Remain flexible throughout the duration of your stay. Remember, people lead busy lives, and a consultation may not be at the top of their priority list. People have paid work, domestic labour and other work obligations, sorry business and other community commitments too. Be open to meeting with people at a later time than planned or on a different day.

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Ask yourself: is my visit necessary?

Ask yourself: is my visit necessary? In many instances, you are likely to get richer, more in-depth and accurate information by speaking with communities in person. The community may also prefer you meet them in-person, rather than correspond online. However, if you feel your work may not require a community visit, you should be weighing up whether you think the benefits elicited through your visit outweigh the disruption to community your stay might bring.

Taking the time to plan out your visit is pivotal to meaningful community engagement built on mutual respect. Working with community stakeholders throughout the process will ensure there are no unpleasant surprises for the community during your visit, and will lead to a better experience for both yourself and the community.

Making MEL easier

Making MEL easier

Monitoring Evaluation and Learning, often called MEL for short, is the practice of collecting and analysing data on a project or program. MEL enables project progress, impacts and performance to be measured and lessons to be generated for improvement of future work.

So many organisations with which we collaborate or provide support in Community Works struggle to achieve an effective approach to MEL. It is either something they feel ill-equipped to do, a reporting burden or a reluctant add-on to projects that are already underway. Many teams rarely appear that they are comfortably and competently managing MEL as a key part of their work.

For MEL to be truly integrated to project work, this situation needs to change. Part of the problem is that MEL is a professional discipline all of its own and one that is akin to research. But most program staff do not have a research background. When educators or health workers or community development practitioners take up a position with an organisation, they are often not acquainted with MEL because it has not been part of their formal training or even their previous experience. Faced with the complex task of defining indicators to measure, collecting data relevant to each and then analysing the data, it is not surprising that they appear overwhelmed. This is especially true where organisations do not already have their own data collection processes and systems.

So, what can be done? Here are suggestions that draw on our experience at Community Works:

Bring in community voices

Most staff working in community or non-government organisations, or for directly for government agencies, are accustomed to speaking regularly with the users of services or with participants in projects. Part of their job is to build trust and rapport with people in the community.

To make MEL easier, these strengths ought to be harnessed. In other words, some of the data collected should bring the perspectives of the community into the data by asking community members what their experiences have been since the project started. A small number of well-designed interviews and focus groups can provide high-quality data and rich insights into projects and programs.

 

Choose indicators with care

Some changes are complex to measure and may require extensive work to develop indicators and then work out how to collect meaningful data. Examples are community resilience or effective governance.

Rather than trying to design a framework for MEL that encompasses the full complexity of a subject, it may be valid to choose aspects that are more measureable and to focus on those. In the case of resilience, a measureable component is the level of confidence that people in the community feel about the steps they will take when a future emergency occurs. For governance, a key element could be the development of the skills of the chair and other members of a community board.

Use Theories of Change

A Theory of Change (or ToC) describes the key cause-effect relationships that underlie a development intervention. The discipline of focussing on the basic rationale for a project or program can help us decide with greater clarity exactly which data we need to collect.

Working with project teams, I have frequently concluded that more time devoted to discussing a ToC and less time spent on brainstorming indicators will lead to a better plan for MEL. Developing a ToC may be yet another discipline for an overstretched project worker to learn, but the benefits justify the effort. The discipline of developing a ToC can be valuable for anything from a single project activity, like a women’s  group or a learning activity at a drop-in centre, to a major program scheduled over several years.

Less can be more

A few times recently I have been asked to review logical frameworks that represent the designs of projects or programs. Sometimes the column that includes indicators is very long. In other words, there are too many indicators. The impression is that the project team has thought of every single measure that could be applied but nobody has then culled the list to one that is manageable. One to three indicators per activity is usually enough for a logical framework. For a project or program as a whole, then between four and eight indicators ought to suffice.

 We must always keep in mind that practising MEL costs time and money. Focussing on a smaller number of indicators is more efficient and less overwhelming for a team to manage than trying to apply a comprehensive set of measures that cover every aspect of the project. There is little to be gained from adding more indicators if the existing ones already enable effective MEL.

Direction of travel

For positive changes that can take years to realise, such as changes in attitudes and beliefs, it is unrealistic to expect a project of one, three or five years in duration to achieve those changes. In these situations, MEL should therefore concentrate on indicators that represent positive steps towards those longer-term goals. We call this the direction of travel. For example, for an individual or a group of people to show greater awareness of the health effects of smoking is an important step towards a change of attitude towards smoking.

Coupled with use of a Theory of Change, being clear about the direction of travel is valuable in reducing unrealistic ambitions of MEL, making it less daunting and more effective for even small organisations with limited resources to use effectively.

Rather than MEL being a burden for many teams and therefore done either poorly or not at all, it can be made easier. As a result, the value of doing it becomes apparent again. With data on the difference that projects and programs make, we are in a better position to know whether they are actually working. And we also learn why that might be the case and how to improve our work in the future.

‘We are not researchers’ – Making M&E accessible

‘We are not researchers’ – Making M&E accessible

‘We are not researchers’

Making M&E accessible

Steve Fisher

The increasing need for evidence of the impact of investments in social development, health and education programs places pressures on organisations and their staff. This is not unreasonable, but for many people, monitoring and evaluation remains an obscure subject, distant from the day-to-day activities of working with clients.

Community Works often runs introductory training workshops on monitoring and evaluation for health workers, NGO board members or groups of development professionals seeking to strengthen their work in this area. Sometimes participants make clear their difficulty with the subject. ‘We are not researchers’ they say. ‘Çollecting and analysing data is not something we have done before’. Or, they sometimes imply, is that the reason we became health or community workers in the first place.

We have learned from these experiences. As a result, we try to develop materials and deliver training sessions that follow four key principles:

Modify language

The phrase ‘impact assessment’ often throws people off course straight away. We have found that ‘measuring change’ is a good way to talk about monitoring and evaluation because it leads to a conversation about what are the specific changes a project or program intends to achieve and how can we best measure those changes. In social development, usually the answer is to ask people good questions. The same applies to other terms, such as data (equals information).

 

Desmystify the subject

Monitoring and evaluation is research. But that doesn’t mean the subject has to be clouded by research process jargon. For example, data analysis can be broken down into a process of grouping responses to interviews or surveys into key messages, trends and ideas. We often suggest that teams measuring change present all their data on the wall or on a big table, so everything can be seen together. That makes it easier to spot key insights and other information.

Focus on the process

When an electrician or a plumber comes to my house to repair or install something, the technical language they use is often a barrier to me understanding what they are going to do. We have addressed language above. But not knowing the process also leaves me clueless about their work. The same applies to monitoring and evaluation. In supporting better practice, one of the most useful ways we have found to support people is to set out the steps required. We sometimes present the process visually, as a flights of stairs for example. Once people can see the steps, the whole process seems more manageable.

Build on the strengths of participants

Often, qualitative information is best collected through, for example, interviews and focus groups. It sounds obvious, but the backgrounds of certain professional or community groups can be very good preparation for this kind of work. For example, health workers are often skilled in putting people at ease and asking questions in a supportive and encouraging way. This means they are often very effective, once given the chance to practice and guidance on the way to facilitate a focus group, for example.

In our training programs, we like to introduce practice early on. We find that participants who might have approached M&E with indifference or fear, become animated and interested when they see how effective they can be in collecting information through talking to people.

Celebrating Christmas in Summer by Vanessa Angulo

Celebrating Christmas in Summer by Vanessa Angulo

Earlier this year our Community Works Team had its yearly Christmas celebration. It was difficult to put all the calendars together and find a date where we all could be at the same place, at the same time. So, we decided the best time of the year for this was mid January, and gathered on a lovely sunny day in Melbourne for a yearly meeting, followed up by a social gathering including family and kids; ice-cream, a few drinks and pizzas. It was such a great opportunity to catch up with fellow team members, families… and meet new babies!

Community Works exists to help organisations working on community-oriented projects and programs to improve the quality and result of their activities. The company started in 2008; although, our Director, Steve Fisher, had been doing similar work for several years prior to that.

Our team consists of a very talented group of people with different skills, knowledge, experience and backgrounds. We gathered at a meeting room booked at the Abottsford Convent for a change, and discussed about all the different projects we have engaged in this year. 

The impact of the work we do at Community Works is growing through partnerships, new and existing regular clients; as well as, by developing a close relation with other development organisations and NGOs.

This year we hope to develop new partnerships, sign new agreements, keep working with our regular clients and to continue to contribute to great results and programs of high positive impact at local, national and international levels.

A group from RACI visiting the Akeyulerre Healing Centre with ELP in Alice Springs