Palestinian NGO Project
01 Jan 2004NEWSLETTER
PROJECT UPDATE AND INTRODUCTION
Phase II of the Palestinian NGO Project (2001 – 2005) is now coming to an end. The majority of our activities will be completed by August 2005, and our team is now concentrating on two main tasks:
· LEARNING: Ensuring assessment / evaluation and reporting on Phase II
· PLANNING: Ensuring we work with the World Bank to design the best possible Phase III
The Planning task will be the subject of future newsletters in this first half of 2005. Currently, the Welfare Association Consortium, led by the Welfare Association, is negotiating with the World Bank on the exact how and when of Phase III. We will keep you updated.
With regard to the Learning task, we are well on the way to establishing a solid body of knowledge that will directly influence the design of Phase III. This body of knowledge is made up of data from our monitoring and evaluation systems, and of data from the series of external assessments we are commissioning. The external audits are already being carried out by the auditor Talal Abu Ghazaleh & Company International, who won the competitive tender for the work in 2004. We have also commissioned an external Beneficiary Impact Assessment, which is being conducted by the local partnership of Alpha International and CDPHC. The field work is already completed for this assessment, and when published it will give us and our partners a clear picture of what the end-beneficiaries themselves think of the project.
However, formal external and internal M+E processes do not tell the full story of how we are documenting what has happened in Phase II, and learning lessons for the future. Our team of Programme Officers continues to be our core connection to the field, and our core source of knowledge of what is going well and what is going badly on our projects. All problems are a source of learning for future planning, and that is why we are so keen to hear about them. Both the Welfare Association Consortium and the World Bank have already worked with the staff to iterate the lessons we have learnt from Phase II, the Consortium holding a Strategic Planning Retreat in Amman Jordan, and the World Bank meeting our team here in Jerusalem.
One exercise which we have been carrying out over the past months is the subject of this Newsletter. Our team has been visiting the beneficiaries in the field and talking to them to get individual narratives – people’s stories – that complement the figures and statistics we produce to give a fuller picture of what the PNGO Project does, and how it does it. This Newsletter contains four stories: Zahra Mahmoud Abu Aqil, a farmer from al-Simia, south of Hebron; Sheikh Bassam, the manager of a health clinic in al-Samu’, the small town near al-Simia; Kamal Khalid Hasan Wakid, a farmer from al-Araqa, near the northern West Bank town of Jenin; and Amer Rahal, the project manager of a Jenin refugee camp-based cerebral palsy programme in the Jenin district.
Please read the stories, and feel free to let us know what you think. All our partners already know our contact details, which can also be found on the front page. We would also like to encourage everyone else involved with the PNGO Project to submit their own stories – we will be happy to work with you, and to hear what you think about the change, the success, or the failure of our work together.
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