Application of ‘Msc' Tool in Ethiopia

Background

The Strengthening Communities’ Responses to HIV/AIDS (SCRHA) project is being implemented by PATH in eight regions of Ethiopia. The Most Significant Change (MSC) tool, commonly known as Monitoring without indicators, which is an emerging scientific participatory M&E method, was tested in this project by the Ethiopian Public Health Association (EPHA).

Objective

The methodology was applied to test the feasibility of the MSC tool in a complex community based projects like SCRHA.

Method

At first, the domains of changes were identified as palliative care, economic strengthening and Volunteer provision service components of the project.  Following that, the tool has been adopted from the Rick Davies guide to fit the context of the SCRHA project and then pretested in a pilot to make sure its feasibility.  As the method is bottom-up approach, a group of people went to the grassroots level and collected the pool of MSC stories. Of the collected stories, few of them have been selected as most significant changes in their domains by setting sound criteria relevant to the project. This was done in the workshop by panels of individuals who were drawn from various project stakeholders.

Result

The MSC M & E technique has been proved as an essential tool in finding out qualitative outcomes in the community based projects (like in the case of the SCRHA) to compliment quantitative data. Implementing partners are also able to adopt and use MSC tool in their regular M & E tasks as they find it effective. Eventually, the selected stories verified and communicated to project stakeholders have been used for organizational learning and celebrating achievements.

 

Recommendation              

The tool is useful for programs focusing on social change that may not be adequately supported by the conventional M&E with defined indicators.

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