Monitoring, Evaluation, Research & Learning (MERL) Associate Khulisa
In 2021-2022, Khulisa Management Services completed an evaluation of the Effectiveness of Programs for Protection of Refugee Youth in Urban Settings in Africa supported by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM). Led by Dr Martha Muco and Jesse Webb, the evaluation team conducted key informant interviews with members of international organizations, non-government organizations (NGOs) and 59 refugee youth beneficiaries and surveyed a further 320 beneficiaries. Story telling is particularly important when evaluating programs focused on vulnerable populations. This population has multiple layers of vulnerability. The complexity of their challenges and thus the complexity of the required response is minimized when one does not tell their stories. One example is a refugee girl in Uganda whose mother is very sick with diabetes, spends her days foraging for food and trying to access medication from local clinics. She faces daily the risk of gender-based violence and often the clinics do not have stock of medication for her mother. In this evaluation, we told the story about the challenges that refugee youth in African cities face, and the story of how a donor through local organizations can change that story. The report included both visualizations of the amalgamated data as well as quotes and descriptions of the stories of individual refugees across Egypt and Uganda. The presentation will give practical guidelines on why storytelling is essential in evaluating programs for the most-vulnerable populations and how we collected and retold those stories.
