AMREF HQ website: On Katine

This page will provide links to:

• Katine project documents publicly available on the AMREF HQ (Nairobi) website
  • Key Katine documentation
    
• Articles about Katine available on the AMREF HQ (Nairobi) website
  • http://www.amref.org/index.asp?PageID=35&PressReleaseID=389&SearchStr=katine
  • http://www.amref.org/index.asp?PageID=35&PressReleaseID=390&SearchStr=katine
  • Recruitment of a Project Manager for Katine, undated

AMREF UK on Katine

This page will provide links to:

• Katine project documents publicly available on the AMREF UK website
  • Key Katine Documentation
• Articles about Katine available on the AMREF UK website
  • Katine Website wins an award (13th June 2008 )
  • Community Partnering – the missing link(12th June 2008 )
    
  • Katine: It starts with a village’ is shortlisted for an award (15th May 2008 )
  • Katine development project off to a flying start (14th December 2007)
  • AMREF announces new partnership with the Guardian and Barclays (19th October 2007)
  • Katine FAQs: Get involved / Donate (undated)
  • Katine FAQs: Who is involved? (undated)
  • Katine FAQs: The project (undated)
  • Images of Katine (undated)
  • The Katine Project (undated)
    

Baseline household survey, January 2008

A baseline household survey was carried out in January 2008. The full text of the report of the survey is available here

The results are discussed on the Katine blog

My comments to AMREF on the baseline survey are available on the Guardian website, or here on the Evaluating Katine blog

Contents of the report

Executive Summary ………………………………………………………………………………….5

I. Background ………………………………………………………………………………………..10

2. Household Characteristics……………………………………………………………………14

3. Household Water Sources …………………………………………………………………….15

4. Household Sanitation and Hygiene………………………………………………………..20

5. Reproductive Health ……………………………………………………………………………23

6. HIV/AIDS Knowledge …………………………………………………………………………..26

7. Fever/Malaria …………………………………………………………………………………….31

8. Home-based care and community sensitization — Village Health Teams……34

9. Household Food Security and Livelihood ………………………………………………..35

10.Conclusions and Recommendations ……………………………………………………..39

Katine stakeholder meeting and preliminary project steering committee meeting: April 3rd, 2008

This AMREF document is available on the Guardian newspaper Katine website, in an article titled “Stakeholders question timescale of Katine project”

I posted the following comments:

“I was pleased to see the article about the recent stakeholder meeting held in Katine (“Stakeholders question timescale of Katine project”) and to be able to access online a record of the meeting (“Katine stakeholder meeting and Preliminary project steering committee meeting April 3rd 2008″)

I would hope that further meetings like this are also shared on the Katine website. In the process, I hope that some more detail is provided on the participants who are not government representatives. It seemed that in this meeting almost all participants were government officials or representatives. If that was meant to be so, it would be useful to make that clear. Similarly, records of future meetings should be very clear on who they were meant to include.

My main reason for emphasising this point is that one of the evaluation criteria I will be using (as the external monitor/evaluator) is equity. This means fairness of process as well as fairness of result. There is a second dimension here as well, that of transparency. If a record is kept of the participants in such meetings it will be possible for myself, the Guardian journalist (Richard Kavuma) and anyone else, to make follow up contact with the meeting participants later on, both to hear their views of the meeting, and of what has happened thereafter.”

AMREF’s Open Information Policy

In September 2007 I suggested that AMREF should develop a Disclosure Policy to govern what sort of information it should make publicly available, and under what circumstances. Such policies have been adopted by other international organisations such as the World Bank and Action Aid.

In November 2007 AMREF’s Board approved their Open Information Policy, and it was subsequently made available on the AMREF website. ( NB: It is possible this document was already under discussion before my suggestion was made)

After reading the Open Information Policy (OIP) and associated Implementation Plan I provided feedback on a number of areas:

Positive developments

• The OIP has been drafted, approved and made public
• There is an associated implementation plan, with targets and responsible persons
• There is a proposal in the OIP to annually review compliance/implementation of the policy
• The OIP will include information on AMREF’s human resource policies
• The intention to provide information on AMREF’s partners on AMREF’s websites. It is surprising how often they are not listed on aid agencies websites, or if they are, how hard it is to find this information

Areas for further attention

• Although the OIP refers to public sharing of information about “Feedback: A periodic presentation of our stakeholders’ views of us and our performance through annual reports and reports of external evaluations conducted by donors, in conjunction with AMREF”, this has not yet been included in the Implementation Plan
• The one conspicuous gap/omission in the Implementation Plan is project documentation. Possibly the most important of these would be project memorandums/agreements with donors, progress reports and evaluation reports. Given the number of these it would make sense for AMREF to do what they do in libraries when re-classifying books: start uploading this info on all new projects started this year and thereafter, and when time permits upload info on old projects (esp. those still in operation).
• Both the household and community baseline surveys recently carried out in Katine have generated sets of data that would be of interest and value to other parties outside AMREF, both within Uganda and outside. Unfortunately it is common practice for aid organisations to not routinely make this information public. Ideally the Katine survey data should routinely be made public. The only proviso being that in the case of household survey data respondents’ names should be replaced by ID numbers, to preserve anonymity. Or, where the survey is about politically or socially sensitive issues). The village profile data should be especially useful to other NGOs working in the Katine area (8 or more). It would also be useful to external evaluators, both myself and any mid-term review teams, as a continuing record of where AMREF is doing what.
• Given the volume of information that will be involved it will be essential that the new AMREF website has clear and usable ways that visitors can navigate around the webs site. There are at least three ways, all of which need to be offered: (a)a good key word search facility, such as that provided by Google, focused on AMREF’s own website, (b) a site map showing how the pages of the website are linked to each other, usually shown in a tree diagram form, (c) well structured pages that show what is available on other web pages e.g. by using tabbed menus at the top, etc.