gold-youth is honoured to have won the Medium Category of the MTN Awards for Social Change: Rewarding good M&E!

The MTN Foundation, in partnership with Trialogue launched the MTN Awards for Social Change in 2019, to encourage and reward good monitoring and evaluation (M&E) practice in the non-profit sector.

Seventy NPOs across the three categories entered these Awards. Entries were shortlisted by Trialogue, with the 20 shortlisted applicants reviewed and scored by three judges. Overall, the judges found that applicants have an appreciation for the value of M&E, building in processes and checks to monitor and track progress over time. However, such efforts are often limited to the monitoring of outputs, with significantly less emphasis placed on the measurement of changes at outcome level.

One of the contributing factors to this is that the pathways to change (theory of change) for interventions are often unclear, such that organisations are unable to clearly articulate how their inputs and activities contribute to the achievement of their stated objectives. Where M&E was done well, organisations shared the findings internally and externally, and used these to improve both project design and implementation.

Judges’ feedback:
“ The gold model uses peer education and mentoring to effect change. The programme is well designed, informed by academic research and was piloted before extended roll out. gold-youth has well-established M&E practices. M&E evidence is continuously used to assess the needs of communities and has been used to scale the operations of the organisation. It is also used to hold the organisation accountable to its stakeholders.”

Thank you MTN South Africa and Trialogue!