Human resources
ToroDev is made up of five professional staff members who are quite cooperative hence making my work easy and fun.
We have had a lot of staff motivational programmes like break tea, and lunch arrangements. Staff meetings have also been going on every Mondays of the week from 9:00am to 10:00am. The meetings are brainstorming sessions where staff members evaluate their perfomance in the previous week, their plans for the week, management issues and all the other businesses related to their work. The meetings have ensured timely delivery of internal communications, project reports, easy evaluations of project progress to reduce on staff conflicts. The meetings also act as reminders of the contract the staff signed with the organisation to ensure professionalism and implementation of projects based on the core values of the organisation.
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| M&E Officer Amanya Sheila |
To ensure timely delivery of work, the organisation has also ensured that every staff has a computer fully connected with internet for easy internal and external communications and internet research.
The staff has been small and quite easy to manage, but with the new organisational arrangements to ensure self sustainability in cases of limited donor funding. ToroDev has started another commercial department called The Business Incubation Initiative which will be carrying out training, research and consultancies in entreprenuership development, Human Resources, ICTs, communications and public relations among others. The Business Incubation Initiative will employ quite a big number of staff to do consultancies which will require a more empowered and bigger Human Resource Sub-Department.
In the 2011/2012 financial year, the organisation will send some of its staff for more trainings in research, project monitoring and evaluation, project management and accounting to its staff to ensure delivery of quality services to the target communities.
Monitoring and Evaluation
M&E is an essential component for is project which helps to understand what to monitor and to reflect progress against plan, provide field back, identify needed changes and improve work processes and objectives and evaluate any activity of the project needs to reflect the objectives of your monitoring plan.It’s a continuous process that the evaluator does through out the life of the project
Since the monitoring and evaluation docket falls under the department, it has been quite busy implementing the rural radio broadcasting for entreprenuership promotion project in the Rwenzori region districts. The project is supported by ToroDev and Stem van Afrika (SvA).
Under the project we have been evaluated by a highly professional institution called CAMECO based in Germany, who have been no nosense in ensuring that the project achieves its desired impact.
Conceptually monitoring and evaluation focused on monitoring the primary and secondary stakeholders of the project .
Geographically Monitoring and evaluation dealt with the primary and secondary stakeholders from Rwenzori region districts of Kabarole, Kyenjojo, Kwegegwa Kamwenge, Kasese, Bundibugyo and Ntoroko. In order to effectively monitor all the activities of the project, the evaluator formulated various objectives and questions to help in findings all the needful information from the primary and secondary stakeholders which include:
It was quite an interesting and challenging assignment which led to the formation of seven rural radio listenership clubs comprised of small scale entreprenuers (women and youth). The project has also established strong networks with all the eight Rwenzori region based radio stations and established strong linkages between rural radio listenership clubs and rural radio journalists for easy monitoring and evaluation and finally, impact assesment.
We havent been fooled by our shortterm achievemnets, we are continuing to carry out more monitoring and evaluation assignments for our project participants to ensure a well empowered community with quality skills to exploit all the available ICT tools like FM radio stations to acheive healthy entreprenueral goals.
In addition to our free community services, we have also commercialised our Monitoring and Evaluation services targeting both private and public institutions to ensure a healthy finacial sustanability of the organisation in times of weak donor funding for projects. Since ToroDev is a not-for-profit organisation, the profits got from the private consultancies will be ploughed back to the communities.
Monitoring and evaluation activities
The M&E team evaluated all the activities that were carried out in 2010-2011 which included the knowledge sharing workshops in October - November 2010 in all the seven districts of Rwenzori Region and the training of the rural FM radio journalists and listenership club leaders in the Region.
The Evaluation team interacted and shared with the primary and secondary stakeholders to gather their decisions regarding on the effectiveness of trainings and knowledge sharing workshops and the efficient use of rural FM radio stations to promote business of rural people especially the rural youth and women.
Efforts were also taken to assess inputs of the trainings and knowledge sharing workshops by interviewing the primary and secondary stakeholders. Out puts of the trainings and knowledge sharing workshops, out comes of the listenership clubs were also evaluated and monitored and assessment of impacts of activities carried out in the organization to the primary and secondary stakeholders.
All the above activities have provided a firm foundation to generate information for the next line of activities to be carried out in other project areas.
Expected outcome of the Monitoring and Evaluation activities
M& E team expects to assess the impact of the project to its primary and secondary stakeholders
M & E team also expects to evaluate the ,inputs, outputs and outcomes of the project
M& E team expects to find out if the activities and objectives are fulfilled according to the project plan
Future plans
To move to the community and interview the primary and secondary stakeholders on the impact of the project to their businesses
To monitor the on going radio programs of primary and secondary stakeholders on the different radios stations in Rwenzori Region.
