Social Impact Project for Monitoring & Evaluation Expert to Support Communities in Colombia

How This Works

As part of the TRANSFORM Support Hub, you will learn how to advance your career while getting hands on experience on projects like this one.

Project Description and Impact

With support from the Gates Foundation, we started last year an exciting program to improve access to healthy and affordable food in the vulnerable communities of Cali, Colombia. Our organization is currently operating a value chain completely integrated in the local economy. This means that most of its producers and providers are locally sourced. This is creating a significant impact on the local society through the creation of decent jobs, 90% of which are for women. Although we know there is an impact created we don't know yet HOW MUCH.

This project is about the HOW MUCH: Quantifying and Qualifying impact.

Our business involves delivering an Early Childhood Development (ECD) program in an Efficient and Effective manner. Obviously the young infants are her primary beneficiaries, but parents benefit from it as well. And then there is ICBF, Colombia's Child Protection Agency, who is in charge of the ECD program. They need to make sure that the Operators they hire to deliver the ECD program are doing so in an efficient and effective manner. ICBF is monitoring this periodically by verifying development of the children in the program.

There has been less focus however on the Impact Monitoring and Evaluation Framework.

Your project would be to design and (help) implement our organization's Monitoring and Evaluation Framework to measure Impact.

Learning Opportunity

Of course this is a very personal question. And I can answer this from my own perspective.

As a professional from Europe I had to adjust a lot. The the local context of Colombia is in no ways similar to anything in Europe, or North America. If you are from Asia (ie. Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Japan) or Australia, NZ, the same applies. After making numerous mistakes, I am now at a stage where I can apply my skills and experience to our work in the local communities at at a level that is fun and challenging at the same time. There is a strong demand for people like you (us).

While a couple of us have paved the way, it will now be easier for you to spend your time productively and actually make a difference. Within the clearly structured scope of the projects you can enjoy autonomy in the way you structure your work. Your input is very valuable!

What you will take away from this experience is that you will be adding value in the most unexpected ways, and gaining hands-on experience in a growing social enterprise.