In Tanzania, almost half of children graduate from primary school without the ability to read and write. This problem has been further aggravated by Tanzania’s policy around “fee-free” primary education, which has drastically increased classroom sizes and often reduced education quality in primary schools. Based in Dar es Salaam, a city with a population of over 5 million residents, Organization for Community Development (OCODE) addressed this issue by involving families, community members and school teachers in helping children master foundational literacy and numeracy skills.

Beginning in 2014, Firelight funded OCODE to develop a multi-pronged program to train school teachers in child-centered pedagogy, support struggling children with afterschool remedial sessions in literacy and numeracy, and enable volunteer community-based facilitators to mentor and visit the most vulnerable children at home.

In combination with other forms of capacity building, Firelight invested deeply in OCODE’s monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) capacity. In 2015, Firelight asked the Aga Khan Foundation Institute of Educational Development (AKU-IED) to conduct tailored MEL capacity building for OCODE. To ensure that the training was applicable to OCODE’s specific context, the initial needs assessment was conducted at OCODE’s offices in Dar es Salaam. The resulting capacity building and mentorship plan linked to the group’s activities and programs and the trainings led OCODE to develop MEL tools and to hire a full-time MEL officer.

In 2018, Firelight brought in the expertise of Nuru Lugumira and his team to conduct MEL training for the entire cohort of five organizations working on early learning in Tanzania. To truly understand CBOs’ capacity, the team conducted an initial scoping visit to all CBOs, followed by a comprehensive training for all CBOs. Afterwards, the team – in partnership with each CBO –prepared a full capacity building plan tailored to each CBO’s needs and capacity, involving many mentorship visits to refine and update tools around reporting, success stories, stakeholder analysis, and MEL framework/plan. Acknowledging OCODE’s existing strengths in monitoring, evaluation, and learning, this capacity building built upon those strengths and addressed remaining challenges.

The emphasis on learning in these trainings has also been especially helpful to OCODE, as they see their programs as constantly evolving and changing with new information, especially as they transition their program to new districts. They also actively inform their communities about progress made – analyzing data and simplifying lessons learned from their programs to share with stakeholders in the community.

With much more strength in their monitoring, evaluation, and learning systems, OCODE has even secured new and increased funding from other external foundations, who are able to trust that OCODE can provide them with sound and detailed evidence of impact.

We support our grantee-partners to build a robust learning and evaluation mindset so they can sustain an ongoing, iterative learning process in their work and communities long after we are gone.

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