Program Monitoring & Evaluation

Save the Children was tasked with an external, multi-year, mixed method evaluation of an integrated nutrition and literacy program in Guatemala, funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program.  STC implemented the LENS project over a period of five years with the project-level goal of improving literacy of school-age children by improving the quality of literacy instruction, student attentiveness and student attendance.  The project aimed to reach 283 schools in six municipalities in the Quiché Department of Guatemala and have 111,343 beneficiaries throughout its lifetime.

J&A’s data collection activities included: recruiting enumerators, creating a schedule for data collection, arranging logistics for enumerator training, obtaining tablets and programming questionnaires for electronic data collection, translating questionnaires, pre-testing and piloting questionnaires, contacting schools in advance of data collection, procuring lists of students and teachers, securing consent, arranging logistics for transportation, interviewing, focus groups, overseeing data collection activities, implementing quality control, reporting, data entry and submitting complete clean datasets.

SNACS-II was a comprehensive, nationally representative assessment of childcare providers participating in USDA’s Child and Adult Care Food Program. Providers included childcare centers, Head Start centers, family day care homes, at-risk afterschool centers, and outside-school-hours care centers. The study addressed more than 70 research questions organized around eight research objectives.

J&A gained cooperation from sponsors and providers of childcare, and coordinated with these providers to prepare for onsite data collection activities, beginning with reaching out to sponsors by telephone and/or email and ending with completing specific activities for data collection visits. These included coordinating logistics, establishing rapport, scheduling site visits and working with a sample that was ineligible and/or refused to participate.   J&A bilingual recruiters recruited 233 sites across the United States, providing recruitment status reports and entering data in the study’s database and Sharepoint.