All West and Central Africa region news

Every year, as part of the CSN small grant competition, we offer CSAs the chance to win a grant in order to foster and stimulate innovation and learning within the network. These MEAL & SUS grants are designed to focus on monitoring, evaluation and learning in order to create sustainable and long lasting work. This year’s recipients are Feed the Children in collaboration with SUN Civil Society Alliance Kenya and Youth lead 4 Nutrition Kenya,Disaster and Environmental Management Trust and Civil Society Organizations Scaling Up Nutrition Alliance (ZCSOSUNA), Nutres in El Salvador, Civil Society Scaling Up Nutrition in Nigeria (CS-SUNN) and Alliance SUN Côte d’Ivoire.

• Country: Ivory Coast
• Led by :  Alliance SUN Côte d’Ivoire – Alliance SUN Côte d’Ivoire 
• For more info contact: http://www.alliancesun.ci/
• Project focus and innovations and innovations: Independent, participatory, sustainable monitoring systems to map community needs, development of context specific joint advocacy.

Project Goal

The project aims to fine tune and standardize CSA protocols and tools to conduct independent and participatory community-based needs assessment. 32 CSO representatives, working in 4 different regions, will be trained on participatory needs assessment techniques and will implement it at community level. Once the data is analysed, CSO members of the Alliance will jointly develop advocacy messages and strategies to make sure that key stakeholders will be addressing those needs at all levels.

The needs assessment will be rigorous, and the capacity and tools adopted by the CSAs are likely to be utilized as systematic ways of working of the alliance to target efforts on nutrition and to enhance collaboration among members at all levels.

Project Outline

To ensure that funding has reached its targets and benefits the whole community, thus leading to the involvement and satisfaction of beneficiaries, the independent and participatory monitoring mechanism remains an effective tool.Independent and participatory monitoring enables civil society to track government policy, programmatic, impact and financial commitments in nutrition.

It also allows the community to take ownership of the actions implemented for them and to effect a change in behaviour and habits, thus allowing the actions to be sustainable. Awareness and training on civic engagement helps instil in the community to be more receptive, open, and engaged in nutrition.

Independent and participatory monitoring can be done in a number of ways: Self-referral and government and /or state mandate.

1. Self-referral:

populations and civil society organizations (CSOs) can take action and put an independent and participatory monitoring mechanism in place.

2. The government and / or state mandate

The government or state of a country recognizes the importance of a civil society structure and gives it the mandate of independent and participatory monitoring of its development policy, program or action in a given sector.

3. The submission of an independent and participatory monitoring project.

Civil society, aware of its importance and its role of citizen control, develops an independent and participatory monitoring project on a development policy, program or action in a given sector and submits it to the state or government of a country. With the agreement of the government and financial partners, this project is financed and implemented by civil society, which reports in detail to the government and / or state, to financial partners and to communities.

How will they achieve this?

Methodology for implementing independent and participatory monitoring includes:

– Establishment of the independent and participatory monitoring mechanism

– Community data collection, coordination reports and their processing

– Feedback and discussion of the results with the competent authorities and the community before consolidation and publication of the reports

– Advocacy for the desired changes.

A team will be set up to process the data collected. For data collection, tablets are used by the investigators and the software used is the KoBoCollect.

A report is drawn up and discussed with stakeholders before its consolidation and publication. This report makes it possible to develop a plea for taking into account the aspirations of communities. This advocacy is carried out at community, regional, national level according to the mapping and analysis of the needs of the communities.

Through the independent and participatory monitoring mechanism, Alliance SUN Côte d’Ivoire will engage national and international CSOs in independent and participatory monitoring and in the development of alternative reports on public nutrition policies or any matter of general interest. related to nutrition.

Disseminating results and innovation

The assessment will be done in two ways. Firstly, there will be a pre-test and a post-test. The pre-test before the training will allow the consultant to know the prerequisites of the participants on the modules to be addressed. At the end, another test will be done to measure the level of change in terms of improving knowledge. The comparison of the two results will allow Alliance SUN Côte d’Ivoire to learn lessons. The results will be mentioned in the activity reports.

The second level of evaluation will be through an evaluation plan that will be developed and adopted by the board of directors of Alliance SUN Côte d’Ivoire. This plan will include indicators of expected results, planned activities and sources of verification. An evaluation report will be made and communicated at national and regional level.

Looking to the future

The project has the potential to be scaled up because the deliverables (MEAL tools, guide to the independent monitoring mechanism and the sustainability / financing plan) that result will allow this project’s activities to be scaled up in other regions of the country. with a view to the representation of Alliance SUN Côte d’Ivoire throughout the territory.