Marseille 2007
| Abstract #227 - Evaluation of good practice initiatives in the implementation of OVC projects in three southern African countries | ||||
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Session: 16.7: Methodology Matters (Parallel) on Monday @ 14.00-16.00 in 5 Chaired by Graham Hart, Dominique Costagliola Authors: Presenting Author: Prof Geoffrey Setswe - Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa |
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| Additional Authors: Prof Geoffrey Setswe, | ||||
| Aim: The objectives of this study were to: identify good practice and promising interventions in the implementation of OVC projects in Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe evaluate OVC interventions to determine if they meet criteria for good practice interventions identify OVC projects that demonstrate evidence of success identify OVC projects that have the potential to be replicated or adapted to other settings | ||||
| Method / Issue: All OVC interventions funded by WK Kellogg Foundation and coordinated by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) between 2002 and 2006 qualified to be part of this study and to be evaluated to determine if they were good practice initiatives. Several methods were used to determine whether OVC projects were best practice interventions. These include: 1) Researchers visited each of the OVC projects and observed how the projects were implemented. They also took field notes. These field notes were reviewed; 2) Researchers read and reviewed annual progress reports which were submitted by project managers over the five year period; 3) all the participating OVC projects were invited to submit an oral or poster presentation for the closing OVC workshop in February 2007. Projects that submitted a presentation (oral or poster) were then short listed as they met the basic or "first-level entry" requirements of being in documentary form. Seventeen projects were invited to present a paper or poster at the closing workshop of the OVC project in Pretoria, South Africa. To further determine if they qualified to become good practice interventions, the oral and poster presentations of OVC projects were subjected to an evaluation through a documentary review and using ten-point criteria. The 10 point criteria were adapted from ILO (2003). Each criterion was rated using 0, 1 or 2. 0 means that the project does not meet the criterion; 1 means that the project partly meets the criterion and 2 means that the project fully complies with the criterion. Three independent evaluators conducted a document review of posters and a structured evaluation of oral presentations. The evaluators are experts in OVC and behavioural health research and were asked to use a check mark to evaluate the project for each of the ten criteria. The scores for the three evaluators will be added and divided by three to obtain an average score for each project. A project qualifies to be a good practice if it scores 16-20, promising practice if it scores 10-15 and a poor practice if it scores less than 10 on table 1 criteria. The ten point criteria will be pilot-tested on an OVC project administered by at Hope Worldwide in Johannesburg early in February and adjustments will be made where necessary. | ||||
| Results / Comments: The results of this study will be available after the OVC workshop to be held on 8-9 February. | ||||
| Discussion: Deciding what is best is not easy. Best practices can vary over time, as new evidence and new possibilities emerge, and from place to place, depending on available resources and infrastructure (Singleton, 2005). What is best also depends on what people want: for example, an OVC project manager might value practices that bring more food and clothes for clients, while OVC and their parents value lifeskills and long-term education and training. Given this shifting reality, the researchers in this study have chosen to evaluate good OVC practices or promising OVC practices rather than best practices (Skryme, 2002). We also prefer to look at lessons learned as well as success stories. We support the notion by Gainer, (1998) that an organization can learn as much as or more from its failures and near misses as from its successes. | ||||
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