1. What attracted you to working with Nuru?

I looked at the profile of the organization and I saw that they were really committed to working with the community, especially those who are marginalized. I’ve been working with marginalized communities in different places and I wanted to bring my experiences to share with Nuru.

      2. In your previous positions with organizations you worked in some very tough places. What did you learn from those experiences?

I worked in countries like South Sudan. It has been experiencing war and neglected for quite some time and there were no structures in place. I helped to keep them updated on education, so they could take over some responsibilities in education within their country and their government. I feel like we achieved our goal by training teachers, making sure children had access to education, and parents were able to see what the value of education was. I hope that they can continue to grow, and it will help the growth of the country.

      3. You’ve worked in several different countries, how have those experiences been similar and different.

In South Sudan, we were building structures and putting in new things. In Zambia, the structures were already in place, put there by the government. This is also the case in Kenya and Tanzania. In South Sudan, things were quite different. We borrowed a lot of things like the syllabus and training from Kenya. In Zambia, we were trying to reinforce the capacity of the staff that had already been built. 

      4. What initially drew you to working in education?

All along, I’ve seen that education is quite a good profession. I’ve wanted to be a teacher since I was in primary school. I thought when I had the education background, I would be able to assist the community in different ways. I don’t think of teaching as a part-time job. It is something we always have to focus on and help empower the community. It helps to develop the community.

      5. Why did you decide to work for NGOs and other organizations rather than just teach?

Looking at the work of the NGOs, it’s wide and gives someone a number of experiences and helps you to interact with the community. I wanted to reach out, not just in schools, but also with other community members. I like working with stakeholders in other fields like health, agriculture, and income generating programs. It gives me a wide experience to interact with those sectors.

      6. Since you have started working at Nuru, what is your impression of the education program?

With Nuru, I see the education program is something that really is helping to develop literacy in public schools. I see that we can encourage those schools and teachers so that they can use some of the techniques that we use. I am looking forward for our program to keep expanding, so that more pupils in Kuria will be literate, meaning they will be able to read, write, and comprehend.

      7. What do you think is the next step for Nuru’s education program?

Scaling and expanding to other divisions is the next step. Also, we are looking forward to see if some of our staff can be integrated in the public schools. We want to increase the number storybooks and textbooks that we can share with the schools. We will be reaching out to other stakeholders and institutions to create partnerships. We also want to encourage the teachers and headteachers to collaborate with the Nuru staff. We also want to reach out to the PTAs (parent teacher associations) and Ministry officials, so that they will be able to understand our programs.

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As the Agriculture Program Facilitator, I couldn’t ask for a more impressive cohort of leaders. Our team is composed of people of all backgrounds and walks of life. We have on-the-ground former extension officers like Banchyrga Boyene, Tariku Wubete, and Tewodros Teshone who have a wealth of experience helping improve the livelihoods of farmers in villages throughout the Gamo Gofa zone of southern Ethiopia. Nuru Ethiopia’s Agriculture team have years of experience working in the kebeles (the smallest administrative unit in Ethiopia) with farmers to perfect technical practices and introduce improved varieties of subsistence and income-generating crops. Alemseged Lukas and Nigussie Wasihun are both former management-level coordinators from the Government Agriculture Office in Zefine (the “capital” of Boreda, where Nuru Ethiopia’s project office is located). They have coordinated numerous programs in Boreda and are intimately familiar with local agricultural practices, strengths, and areas of need. Combined, the Nuru Ethiopia Agriculture team has experience with many projects and initiatives in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples Region of Ethiopia. All of them hold degrees in agricultural sciences and have conducted fascinating research.

Since the initiation of Nuru training two months ago, the staff have taught me an immense amount about agriculture in Ethiopia. They have shared a wealth of information about soils in different kebeles, different agro-ecological zones and the crops that are suitable for them, and the day-to-day challenges that farmers face. On Fridays we take trips into the kebeles and do walkabouts with farmers, asking them about their farming practices and their visions for a better future. Usually, we talk to one “lead farmer” (a farmer who is respected in the community for his or her agricultural practices) and one “poor farmer” (a farmer who typically has a small landholding and a lack of access to inputs). For me, these are crucial participatory activities that remind us of both the strengths of farmers in the kebeles as well as their vulnerabilities.

On a recent trip to Dubana Bullo, a kebele we are working in, we talked to a farmer who has four hectares (ten acres) of land and a successful ginger project that has given him a 500% return on his investment. His farming practices are so successful that he has been able to send all of his children to school and to enroll in programs that further hone his farming skills. In the same kebele, we visited a farmer’s house who only had 0.1 hectares (0.25 acres) of land and could only feed his six children by doing day-labor and buying two kilos of maize per week to feed them. Around his house he had 20 or 30 enset (false banana) plants, a  popular “fall-back” crop for farmers in southern Ethiopia, that he would harvest as needed and cook with maize flour. Comparing and contrasting the situations of these two farmers can inform the agriculture team about what makes the difference between prosperity and hunger, which is crucial to developing the best possible Agriculture Program for Nuru Ethiopia.

When we left Dubano Bullo after talking to the “poor farmer” we were all a bit choked up about the desperate situation in which he was living. One of the agriculture program staff, Tewodros, stopped all of us on our hike back to the main road and said: “When we are co-creating this program, we have to keep someone like Abera (the ‘poor farmer’) fresh in our minds. If our program cannot impact his situation, then it is not an effective program.”

I think all of us who are in this struggle to end extreme poverty couldn’t agree more. And with the right mix of skills and the dedication and passion of servant leaders like the agriculture team in Ethiopia, we are on the right track to putting into motion a program that can change Boreda, change Ethiopia, and change the lives of struggling farmers throughout the world.

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Nuru International started working in Kuria, Kenya in 2008. To further scale, develop and proof the Nuru Model in a context outside of Kenya, Nuru International started a country expansion initiative. In 2011, Nuru International carried out the bulk of the country selection process, including studies, scouting visits, and deliberation of a country scaling proposal. In 2012, after consolidating the Ethiopia expansion proposal, plans were further developed, and administrative and physical groundwork was carried out. In January 2013, the first Scout Team was onboarded and subsequently trained for their deployment to Boreda, Ethiopia in February 2013.

The goal of Scout Team, the first team of Nuru International staffers in Ethiopia, centers on co-creating the Agriculture Program model together with local Nuru Ethiopia staff. The final product produced by the end of Scout Team – the program proposal – and the process for co-creating that proposal merit further exploration.

By the end of Scout Team, international and local staff together strive to build a proposal for the Agriculture Program in Ethiopia that addresses the need of hunger in an impactful, sustainable, and scalable way. This entails first studying and understanding the need of hunger in local communities. Then, local and international staff will work together to develop a goal, scope, activities, rollout and budget that address the need of hunger with agricultural solutions. By compiling these pieces and more into a cohesive proposal, Nuru Ethiopia and Nuru International staff will have an Agriculture Program model to be then implemented together with communities.

The process of program co-creation – or working in a meaningful partnership with locals to understand problems and then propose and implement solutions – is fundamental to the work of Nuru International. Scout Team centers on training local staff, facilitating work sessions, and also learning from local staff to achieve the common objective of building the Agriculture Program model. Local staff develop strong leadership abilities while at the same time they actively learn-by-doing, alongside their Nuru International counterparts.  This process empowers Ethiopian staff to best analyze local needs and then propose and implement solutions.

Scout Team is a first in many ways for Nuru International. It is the first country project for Nuru beyond Kenya. The product of Scout Team – the Agriculture Program proposal – will be Nuru Ethiopia’s first co-created impact program. It will be later followed by other impact programs of Community Economic Development, Healthcare, and Education. Agriculture Program co-creation in Ethiopia is piloting the way that Nuru International plans to develop programs in all new countries of operation.

Highly competent teams of Nuru International and Nuru Ethiopia staff are ready for the big challenges that come before them. It is in this context that I introduce Douglas La Rose, Nuru International’s Agriculture Program Facilitator for Ethiopia. In the field, he is accompanied by incredibly talented Nuru Ethiopia staff that work in Agriculture, Monitoring and Evaluation, and Leadership Programs, and in Nuru Ethiopia’s Administration. Nuru International field staff for Ethiopia include Team Leader (and CEO) Jake Harriman, Leadership Program Facilitator Barry Mattson, and Monitoring and Evaluation Program Facilitator Kristin Lindell.

Douglas is an anthropologist and agriculturalist who has been working in rural Africa since 2005. He received his M.A. in Applied Anthropology from San Diego State University in 2011 after conducting an extensive quantitative and qualitative research project on agricultural adaptations to environmental change in the Volta Region of Ghana. Douglas has extensive experience in agriculture, having managed an agroforestry project in Ghana that focuses on sustainable cocoa, plantain, banana, and palm nut production.  Douglas has also written and published numerous articles on agriculture, climate change, and environmental anthropology. Douglas was an agroforestry Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana from 2005-2007.

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After implementing the Research and Development (R&D) program for several months, we saw an opportunity to further improve the program in order to serve our community better. Social Enterprises has been pursuing different avenues to increase revenue streams in order to ensure the financial sustainability of our programs. One promising business they found through research was the sales of fast moving consumer goods, and they began developing a Consumer Products Group. Through our conversations with the Consumer Products team, we found that we shared many business processes and decided that it would be most effective to combine our efforts and merge the R&D team with Consumer Products.

As we develop the distribution, marketing, and consumer feedback channels together, we will create access to products for our communities while creating another revenue stream for Nuru’s programs. Not only will community members have access to products that improve their quality of life, but the Consumer Products group will also work closely with the other impact programs to ensure we look for products that will support their efforts as well. For example, the Consumer Products group will continue to sell latrines, soaps, and handwashing stations in the community as those products are critical to helping the Healthcare program achieve its goal of reducing under-5 mortality rates. We’re excited to implement this program as we continuously look for ways to improve our programs in order to serve the community even better.

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These original ideas have been reinforced through our work with our teams in Kenya. We have continued to refine these strategies and have begun to use them with the new project in Ethiopia. It is a unique approach because if we do what we are claiming, our local leaders will define and own the programs and the Western staff needs to hold their programs more loosely than the traditional development worker. It can also be risky because though backed by sound theory there are few organizations that practically do interventions in this way. Though perhaps that is why many nations have been mired in poverty for so long. We recognize how important this approach is and believe the world does not need another organization that gives shoes or shirts away to those living in poverty or one that builds empty schools or hospitals.

Fortunately we are not alone in fighting poverty in this way. A recent article in the Guardian titled, “Building communities: how poor people are unlocking their own potential” discuss Rural Support Programmes in India and Pakistan that work in a similar fashion.  The article describes their successes as shown by the following excerpts:

The RSP philosophy of community self-help works because it doesn’t impose preset development plans from above. No amount of central planning can accommodate the countless variations at grassroots level, and the approach creates the space for poor communities to play an active role in their own development…

A 1998 UN Development Programme evaluation of RSPs said: “The model is unique. It is highly responsive to community motives and aspirations within the context of community participation … [and makes it] feasible to unlock the productive and entrepreneurial potential of Pakistan’s rural people.”

The larger impact by working at the grassroots level is obviously great and a big reason why we do this work but I am also impassioned by the treatment of those we are working with who are living in poverty. I do not want them to feel like they are passive recipients of handouts without ever believing they can set their own course for their lives and their future. I have looked into the eyes of enough marginalized people to know the harm that belief does to their humanity and our humanity as well. I echo the words of Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, who recently wrote a beautiful piece that captures what I believe is the heart of the Leadership Program. She described a visit with d.light to Central Kenya and a discussion David Small, the head of d.light Africa, had with one of d.light’s customers, Teresia. From, “Dignity, Not Dependence While Living Under $1 a Day”:

This is why I am doing this work. This is why I started Acumen: I am witnessing a conversation of equals, one between an empowered consumer and a businessman trying to serve her. Teresia is not pandering nor is she begging. David is neither self-satisfied with his own sense of benevolence, nor is he assuming he has the answers. Teresia may have next to nothing of material value in the world, but here she is, full of dignity, full of the confidence that comes with doing something for yourself and paying for it, to boot. Her eyes sparkle with curiosity and strength. Teresia has earned this conversation. David must continue to work for her loyalty and trust as a customer. In the process, both have the chance to be transformed.

This is the type of relationship the Leadership Program is trying to promote and one that we believe will bring the greatest impact that will last. One where our expatriate staff is humble enough to know they do not have all the answers and do not have any misconceptions about their “benevolent service” working with local communities and leaders who are full of dignity and who are able to make meaningful choices for themselves and their families.

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With the start of Term 2, we will implement a qualitative measurement system to track student progress as well as monitor our team’s delivery of lesson content and their interactions with students. We will use this information to further improve the content of our programs as well as the quality of instruction and student engagement. We will also be working to share our approaches with the school administrators and teachers more actively over the coming months.

A reflection on our goal

The Nuru education program aims to increase basic literacy levels among primary school-aged children living in rural areas and experiencing extreme poverty. We target Standard 2 literacy levels; most countries worldwide agree that children should have developed basic literacy by the completion of their second year in primary school. We work to fill the gap in Standard 2 literacy attainment that exists within public schools throughout rural communities experiencing extreme poverty.

The Standard 2 literacy level represents the level at which children “read to learn” and develop independent literacy skills. Achieving the Standard 2 level ensures basic literacy is instilled for life. Basic literacy enables students to understand lessons across disciplines and perform better across the board, increasing the likelihood that they will complete primary school and progress to secondary school. Basic literacy also contributes to more engaged community members and parents, more informed adults and individuals who are equipped with the fundamental skills they need to become life-long, independent learners.

Our goal is to raise Standard 2 levels through targeted instruction in the essential components of reading, writing and oral language. Reading proficiency includes phonological and phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and text comprehension, as identified by the National Reading Panel (2000). Many literacy interventions overlook oral proficiency, believing that it naturally stems from the development of reading and writing skills. Nuru differs in this regard and is supported by recent research. As stated by The National Literacy Panel on Language-Minority Children and Youth, “instruction in the key components of reading is necessary – but not sufficient – for teaching language-minority children to read and write proficiently in English. Oral proficiency in English is critical as well – but student performance suggests that it is often overlooked in instruction.” (August & Shanahan, 2006, p.4)

We aim to bring high-quality literacy development interventions to rural primary schools as a supplement to existing language development efforts. The Nuru outreach program focuses on creating an engaging and enriching learning environment that is facilitated by a teacher trained in student-centered learning.

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The subject of this post is Nuru International’s approach to environmental sustainability in the Agriculture Program. Nuru International often discusses sustainability in terms of projects running on local finances (Financial Sustainability) and local leadership (Leadership Sustainability). While these values are fundamental to the way projects operate, there are other qualifiers of sustainability. Nuru International has a long-term commitment to partner with communities in developing countries to build and implement programs that are triple bottom line sustainable – socially, economically, and environmentally. The focus topic here is how sustainable agricultural solutions benefit the environment.

Nuru International’s Agriculture Program contributes to a productive and healthy environment:

1) Farm intensification prevents negative environmental consequences

Nuru International’s Agriculture Program partners with local communities to address the need of hunger in a sustainable way. In Kenya, the Agriculture Program seeks to eliminate episodic hunger by increasing crop yields. Besides increasing crop outputs, hunger could also theoretically be eliminated through food aid, population control, or bringing more land under production. Contrasting Nuru International’s approach to alternative approaches helps to highlight how the Agriculture Program benefits the environment.

Food aid can create dependency and is not locally self-sustaining. Nuru International’s Agriculture Program works with local farmers to intensify production on farm plots. When agriculturalists produce more of their own food, they avoid becoming dependent on unnecessary food handouts.

Population controls, although they would decrease hunger long-term, are not effective in the near-term, and can have disastrous environmental, economic and social consequences. In Kenya, hunger-driven rural-urban migration shifts the population from hard-pressed rural areas to over-populated urban areas. This has contributed to the growth of the world’s largest slums outside of Nairobi, with dire environmental and social consequences. When farmers have productive livelihoods in their traditional home place, they make sustainable use of local natural resources, contribute to the national economy under their own stead, and avoid becoming urban slum-dwellers.

Increasing the land under crop production would also be a possible way to address hunger. In Kenya, however, this would often mean invading natural lands, or coming into social conflict with other landholders. In Kuria, Kenya, agricultural land expansion threatens world famous natural reserves like the Masai Mara and can bring about inter-tribal conflict and even violence. On the contrary, when farmers can make sustainable use of their local natural resources, they avoid encroaching on areas of natural and cultural heritage. By avoiding deforestation, the Agriculture Program offsets potential greenhouse gas emissions, stabilizes climate, and helps halt desertification and land degradation.

The Agricultural Program ameliorates multiple negative consequences to the environment by offering farmers the choice to engage in their own sustainable agricultural livelihoods.

2) Implementation of appropriate farming technologies produces more crops in an environmentally friendly way

The Agriculture Program in Kenya works to increase crop yields of maize with input loans of hybrid maize seeds and conventional fertilizers. These are accompanied by technical training and extension to use the inputs in a responsible way that contributes to long-term environmental and soil health.

Nuru Kenya loans farmers hybrid maize seed which is bred and treated to be pest and disease resistant, high yielding, and to exhibit exemplary growth characteristics. Nuru Kenya’s Agriculture Program does not use genetically modified seed. Locally grown hybrid maize seed has the best characteristics to reliably produce maize that efficiently uses water and is well adapted to local soils and climate conditions. The grain produced by this maize is for human consumption and is consumed by Kenyans on a daily basis in the form of stiff dough (ugali).

The input loan also includes conventional fertilizers. These ensure that farmers can produce enough food to address their own family’s hunger. Farmers even produce enough maize to sell surplus yield for a profit and be better prepared for potential economic shocks (like purchasing medicine during a disease outbreak). Farmers apply a relatively small amount of conventional fertilizer, only what is minimally necessary for proper crop development.

When space is limited and a hungry population relies on subsistence agriculture, crop yields are, in part, a function of nutrient availability. Nuru Kenya promotes the use of composting, fallowing land, rotational cropping (for cover, forage or food), and applying animal manure to fields. Conventional fertilizers help address the shortcomings of organic fertilizers, as there are limits to strictly organic production in remote rural agrarian communities.

Producing organic nutrients takes a relatively long time and large area for a limited quantity. Decomposition of organic materials is slow, and ultimately is very dilute in key macronutrients – nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K). Where land is limited and hungry rural people need to produce crops to live, fallowing land and rotational cropping are not options that completely address nutrient needs. Manure also fails to provide a complete fertilizer solution because livestock are too few to produce the amount of manure that would be required. An added challenge to organic fertilizers is that they’re bulky and heavy. For calorie-deprived farmers, especially in an agricultural system powered by physical labor and not by machines, the labor-intensive application of organic fertilizer is difficult.

The Agriculture Program promotes organic production strategies – composting, rotational cropping, fallowing, and manure application, to name a few – as wholly complementary to the use of conventional fertilizers. Promoting all these concepts properly requires the right training and supervision.

Nuru International adopts a responsible and local-lead approach to training and supervising farmers. Staff are recruited locally, trained in technical topics, and then regularly train and advise farmers on how to:

• Pick a plot – not on slopes or near sensitive riparian areas
• Prepare the land well
• Plant correctly 
• Apply fertilizer properly (Teaspoon dosages are hand delivered to each maize hole at the proper depths and spacing)

Proper land selection, preparation, planting and fertilizer application means that the fertilizer stays on the farm and is used by the plant, instead of running off.

3) Sustainable agricultural systems offer good choices to farmers

In Kuria, Kenya, most farmers have switched to maize farming for food and surplus with Nuru Kenya, from a past of farming tobacco for international corporations.  The switch from maize to tobacco has significantly contributed to the environment, soil and human health.

Tobacco is a non-food cash crop that has known toxic and carcinogenic properties, to both its growers (see green tobacco sickness) and its users. Tobacco farming causes soil erosion, requires large amounts of expensive chemicals to keep the leaves healthy, and needs exorbitant amounts of firewood to dry the tobacco.

When tobacco companies came to Kuria, Kenya, lush tropical forest covered large swaths of landscape. A few decades later, no natural forest remained in Kuria, having been burnt as fuel to dry tobacco. If farmers continue to produce tobacco in massive quantities, the resulting deforestation will further push into surrounding regions, negatively impacting forests and wildlife biodiversity.

Nuru Kenya’s Agriculture Program has gotten thousands of farmers to switch from tobacco to maize. In addition to being a crop that Kenyan farmers can use to feed their families and sell for profit, maize production also avoids the need to deforest more land. In fact, with the switch to intensified plots of maize and decreased pressure on fuel (wood) reserves, forests are now able to make a comeback in Kuria, Kenya.

Future Outlook of Sustainability in Agriculture

Nuru International’s Agriculture Program looks beyond today’s needs, beyond the here and now, to anticipate long-term solutions to ending hunger in the developing world. Today, Nuru International is helping to end hunger in Kenya. Over the next year, Nuru International will work to build lasting agricultural solutions to end hunger and poverty in Ethiopia. Over the next decade local people in these and other developing countries will implement solutions on their own, solutions that they originally built together with Nuru International. Their progeny, the next generation of rural farmers, will grow up with a more equitable balance of economic prosperity, social welfare, and environmental protection. Their work will bring about lasting, local-based solutions for generations to come.

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Cognizant of this fact and as part of its scaling plan, CED has completed preparations to scale its services to 5 sub-locations in Msaba, Ikerege and Kehancha Divisions. It is inspiring to see CED scaling to Masaba and Ikerege Divisions for the first time.

The increasing number of members and scaling to every sub-locations and villages of Kuria West district, inevitably causes some challenges in the operations of the program. Planning and adapting to new situations need to be part of the scaling plan. As we continue enrolling new members, we want to make sure that the bond between group members is firm enough to continue the groups’ objectives sustainably.

Facing the challenges of increasing membership, we are looking to help groups to develop their own “group constitution” that will guide their operations and the relationships between them and the CED program. The introduction of a group constitution is aimed at outlining procedures for creating a group, stating the responsibilities, obligations and privileges of a group member, and establishing a set of rules and enforcement mechanisms for meetings, contributions and loan repayment. Such a clear set of guidelines will inevitably help groups to understand and further members’ objectives.

In March 2013, CED staff, in consultation with selected group members, key informants and organizations running similar programs, have completed a draft Group Constitution that will be brought before each group meetings for deliberation, improvement and approval. In the coming weeks, we hope each group member will discuss the contents of the draft constitution and improve the draft to reflect their needs. Once this task is completed by each individual group, the constitutions will be a major document guiding the relation between savings and loan groups and the CED program.

We are confident that this process will be smooth, constructive, inclusive and relevant for all groups working with CED now and in the future.

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My name is Mwita Babere and I work with the Monitoring and Evaluation department as a Research and Advising Manager. My major tasks are to create and maintain continuous feedback loops to update programs on the data collection progress and reporting, explaining and advising programs on metrics in a systematic and effective way for decision-making. This includes writing M&E reports for all major assessments the team conducts for our impact programs and leadership program. Recently we’ve been able to share reports on 2012 literacy improvements with the Education team and the schools where we work. Before that I completed a report on our findings for the Agriculture team on both maize harvest yield increases and the change in income it causes. I also create M&E curriculums and training guides and co-facilitate data collection trainings. This helps support our data collection team, prepares our temporary enumerators to conduct field surveys in the area, and ensures that a high quality of data is returned to the office.

Additionally, I conduct research on M&E approaches, techniques and best practices so as to enhance our M&E system. Recently I have conducted additional research on needs assessment strategies, scaling and scouting strategies, and household hunger measurements. Currently I’m working on how to measure household hunger so that we can better understand the impact our Agriculture Program has beyond maize yields. By researching best practices and how other organizations and institutions measure hunger frequency, duration, and severity, we can ensure that Nuru uses proven methods. We are working to adapt these tools as we consider the activities of the Agriculture program and Nuru International Kenya, the harvest seasons and cycles of hunger here in Kuria West, and the cultural context in our communities.

These tasks are challenging, yes, but I am always motivated because every day is a learning experience for me. Constant interactions with people in the community gives me an opportunity to get to know a lot of things about the levels of poverty and its root causes, changing my previous assumptions. It’s amazing what M&E results can depict and working with M&E is such an exciting experience. It goes without mentioning that team cohesiveness and good interpersonal relationships within our team makes the seemingly impossible possible.

Thank you for reading this post and feel free to leave a comment

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As we embark on teaching Basic Nuru Leadership Training (BNLT), we have instituted a pre and post test. The idea behind this is that participants will take the same assessment at the beginning of class, before they have actually learned anything about the topic, and then again at the end of class after our team has taught all of our lessons. These two sets of scores will help us to understand how much knowledge each person came in with and exactly how much each participant learned in our trainings. They will be able to show us an immediate impact about how our classes directly contribute to an increase in knowledge in each participant. This is important data for us to have for a variety of reasons. It can help us improve our teaching methods, evaluate our curriculum, and see where there may be gaps in our teaching. More importantly, it can also help us to prove that our trainings have had a direct impact on Nuru staff, which in turn should have a direct impact on their work performance.

We are also at the beginning stages of instituting oral assessments for select participants. In our classes there are some individuals that struggle with reading and writing and this can often make sitting down to take our written assessments a very stressful and difficult experience. As a place to start with instituting oral assessments, we have identified one individual known to struggle with literacy. Instead of taking a written assessment, that he most likely would not be able to complete, we took a different approach and decided to ask him the assessment questions orally instead. Due to the opportunity to take oral assessments, on both our Feedback and Focus Project One (FP1) trainings, he scored upwards of 70%, well above our standard 60% pass mark. This is revolutionary for our program. It is entirely possible that our impact is much larger than we are actually able to show right now, simply due to the fact that in the past our assessments had all been written instead of oral. It is incredibly exciting to know that with this one shift, it is possible for individuals to gain confidence as they perform better, and also for our program to gain accurate data of our impact.

We are continually reflecting on the idea of measuring Leadership and often work closely in conjunction with Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) in order to hone our methods and brainstorm new ones as well. As the program grows, our methods of measurement will also undoubtedly grow and improve. In the meantime we have the Staff Leadership Review, pre and post assessments, and also portions of performance reviews in which to gather data about our program. The picture of Leadership’s impact is slowly coming to realization and it is shaping up to be very positive.

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