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Three girls in Zambia - their donation works

Observation of action

Donors have a right to find out what was achieved with their money. It is easy to show with weight measurements or disease statistics that ecological vegetable production in school gardens and regular, balanced meals improve children's diet. However, it is more complex to prove that you also learn better and have better future chances. This is usually only evident when the project has been completed for a long time.

When checking the effect of projects, Terre des Hommes attaches great importance to the participation of the target groups, i.e. those whose living conditions are to be improved with the help of the project. A challenge when observing and documenting the effect is to learn as much as possible about the mechanisms of action and the results and at the same time to keep the effort in a reasonable framework. Therefore, it is good to check your own practice regularly, but it is not necessary to do this with every step and in every project. Once it has been scientifically proven that agricultural chemicals affect the cognitive development of children, it is sufficient in the new project if the Terre des Hommes employee document the change of nutrition to healthy foods.

The basis of the observation of effects at Terre des Hommes are project applications that describe the starting condition and the targets using indicators based on indicators. As a rule, the project partners send reports every six months who inform about the progress and interim results.

The Terre des Hommes specialist on site analyze the reports and discuss the results with the partner organizations in regular visits every six months, for which the information is also checked in a random. Once a year, they create a summary report to the Terre of the Hommes office in Germany. This evaluates the information regarding overarching questions and methods. If problems arise, special questions or methods are to be further developed, or if they are larger projects, evaluations are also commissioned by independent external experts.

The more demanding a project goal is, the more important it is to implement it together with other actors and the more complex observation.

Example Thailand: With therapeutic offers, Terre des Hommes sacrifice of violence.
It is a difference whether 50 children who were victims of violence could be healed with a therapeutic offer, whether the extent of violence in their communities has decreased through a program or whether a city administration is based on care facilities and established preventive programs for violence prevention in the schools of an entire city. The contribution of a Terre of the Hommes project to change the reality of people will not always be prove exactly. But it is clear that he must have contributed to the desired result.

Efficiency is an important criterion for observation of effects: What was caused with a certain amount? However, the effort in the collection of more precise numbers must be in relation to the sum that is available for the implementation of the measure.

When building a classroom, we know that it will be used by 30 children in the future. How long it can be used and how many children will get lessons there is more complicated to calculate. It is even more complex to find out how many children are looked after by a health assistant who is once trained in a terre of the Hommes project, or how many children from a change in the law that promises protection and help actually benefit.

Terre des Hommes distinguishes the number of children or adolescents with whom work directly, from those who indirectly have a benefit from the measure. The latter is the case if, for example, you benefit from a health station built as part of a project or a successful campaign for protecting the waters in which fishing. Basically, the greater the range of the project, the more complex to determine reliable numbers. In order to limit the effort, samples, estimates or experiences and studies from similar projects are therefore used. In the annual reports on the projects, these numbers are observed. In central work areas, with special questions about the effectiveness of a method, or for extensive projects, separate studies or evaluations are also made. Terre des Hommes leads on the ongoing monitoring in the funded projects based on the “concept of effects in program funding in 2010. Effects and observation of action «through.