jeph mathias
evaluation, design, monitoring, capacity
Though presented individually for me design, monitoring, evaluation, capacity building and even training are a continuum. I have only one speciality : understanding contexts, understanding development, putting them together practically and communicating creatively about what emerges. First up I present two methodological innovations, participation and remote work. Both emerge from my underlying philosophy, are highly relevant to our world and are applicable to evaluation, design, monitoring or capacity building. I was evaluatng and designing remotely before Covid, but it is so much more important in today’s climate change and pandemic ravaged world. Even more important, in a world increasingly aware of decolonisation, is participation and actor centred approaches to everything. I consider myself a leader, innovator and learner in participation..
Remote Evaluation and Design
I started emote evaluation and design years ago, primarily to reduce the carbon footprint of my work. Corona virus adds a different relevance to remote suppor in design monitoring and evaluation . Perhaps best known is my 2018 Outcome Harvest with SRSP in NW Pakistan Unable to visit for security reasons I worked with SRSP staff as co-evaluators. They provided contextual understanding, documents and story excerpts. We formed ourselves as a team on an electronic database and coded together. I analysed, pulled together findings and wrote the report. The commissioners and the team were delighted with the result and being cited for innovation at the 2019 IDEAS conference felt like further validation. See the citation in my news that year here, or the IDEAS website itself. Just as tools for remote work (e.g. Zoom, Meet, Otter, Dedoose) are evolving so too I am continuing to learn how to work remotely. In 2022 I supported adolescents in Guatemala developing their own outcome based monitoring in Excel, evaluated again with SRSP in Pakistan worked strategically to help a team implement OM at an organisational level.across all their work in Turkey and worked with a team on a complex evaluation in Australia- all from New Zealand. This cost me some late nights, but cost the planet no carbon.
Participation
A Kenyan street youth’s social media post after a participatory OH. It’s s a treasure of my professional life.
I see good design, monitoring and evaluation as more about process than technique. Who asks questions, whose questions, whose answers, whose objectives? I see myself as a leader in participatory approaches, but I’m totally aware I am still learning . It started with Indigenous people as an OH team in Cambodia way back in 2015. Highlights since have been Kenyan street kids and police working together on design (in a context where police shoot street kids), and local school girls collecting data in Indian villages. In 2022 high-security prisoners in Ōtautahi, New Zealand not only designed and carryied out an OH but also defined the evaluation questions with corrections officers. Wow! It really was their evaluation. In March 2023 I facilitated women working alongside government in Afghanistan for a high quality, participatory OH. Impossible but true! For me system change and special dispensation for Afghan women to work justifies carbon. If radical participation excites you. please contact me- I love exploring and extending possibilities with like-minded boundary-pushers.
Evaluation: looking deeply, thinking hard.- indigenous women, Madhya Pradesh, India
evaluation
Evaluation demands looking deeply-through my eyes, the project's 'eyes' and most importantly participants’ eyes. I'm skilled in asking deep questions of a context, synthesising, analysing and presenting insights clearly and creatively. Aimed at answering current questions and exploring ways forward for me evaluation is not a discreet event but part of a continuum from conception through design to monitoring.
I bring to evaluations a history of work in human/environment problems in challenging contexts plus qualifications in development, medicine, ecology and GIS. I communicate well individually and to groups and work in Hindi, Spanish and Portuguese as well as English. I have designed and evaluated in India, Nepal, Cambodia, Brazil, Colombia. I have expertise in Outcome Harvesting, an evaluation technique inspired by the Outcome Mapping philosophy. I’ve found this particularly useful in evaluating complex contexts.-
Deep communication pre-evaluation is critical to a good evaluation, so please contact me well before your proposed start date. For more see:
design
Good project design is about finding an intervention where a team's maximum contribution to the desired change best intersects with its own values, vision and skills . This involves understanding the context well, identifying critical points and designing an ideal intervention, but also requires that the team understand itself deeply, define its values and vision, their strengths and where they needs greater capacity.
I love working with teams at the design stage and have been part of design many times. I am good at analysis, synthesis, communication and particularly creative facilitation. I'm experienced in Outcome Mapping, a project design particularly applicable to complex contexts
Please contact me if you would like to know about projects I have helped design or if you would like to know more about Outcome Mapping.
With a team in Cambodia- understainding values, vision and the hoped for contribution.
Climate change, Bangladesh. Monitoring = Letting the context ask questions... and responding.
monitoring
Monitoring is the art of letting the context ask its own questions and priming a project to listen, continuously respond and question itself. It requires the project identify what they need to look at and listen to, have skills to gather that, put time into understanding what they find systematise and store the answers, extract meaning then reflectively modify action based on the unfolding world around it. Monitoring is critical to all projects in changing contexts (for me that's all development projects) because they demand continuous adaptation. Every step (working out the right questions, asking them, capturing the answers, extracting meaning and iteratively modifying the project) is subtle. All are critical. A monitoring system is useful only if all the steps are adequately addressed.
Increasingly I see monitoring as the heart and soul of development- Knowing what change one is trying to contribute to, how to recognise it and how to iteratively modify a programme in response to what is (or is not) happening is essential. I enjoy working with teams to set up and use monitoring systems in their context. An exciting integration of clear development thinking and modern technology is field staff using phones or tablets to easily capture data, feed it into electronic systems that automatically analyse and quickly feed back to project direction. Another innovation is qualitative research software to find commonalities and hidden connections. I love being part of the interaction between people and Information technology. A lovely example was working with Guatemalan adolescents on a rights programme, using analysis tools in excel to understand the outcome centred stories they collected. Explaining ‘Pivot tables” really pushed my Spanish- but it was fun and empowering for us all.
capacity building
The team itself is a project’s biggest resource in a complex context. Higher team capacity always translates to better contribution to the vision. As a good teacher and facilitator I enjoy work with teams on skills and understanding from workshops on theoretical dimensions of complexity to practical courses in Outcome Mapping, and Outcome Harvesting I am interactive and participatory in my teaching and extensively use problem solving and games. We always have fun.
As well as training on complexity and Outcome Mapping and outcome Harvesting I do team building to help teams understand and work with each other better. As a doctor and Alpine climber I use the same core skills- interactive problem based learning and good facilitation- to teach alpine skills and wilderness medicine in remote mountainous situations I love facilitation and do it well.
Nutting it out together: Problem solving at a team building workshop Uttarakhand India.
training/education/spreading ideas
Grasping and using the ideas: A team design their own OH on their own programme at the end of a one day OH workshop. Impressive!
I am often asked to talk about or teach in the global North and South. These opportunities because they force me to step out, reflect on what happens "at the coalface", how and why and tell the stories clearly and creatively. Examples are two days on Climate Change and Complexity for a masters course in Malaysia, an “inspirational keynote” for OMLC’s actor centred development workshop (Brussels, Dec. 2022) , three hours on "Thinking out of the Box" for UNFPA in Delhi, a "Conservation as Social Science" afternoon for the Wildlife Institute of India and two days of "Development in Complexity" with Change Alliance. I’ve delivered AEA conference presentations (Nov 2015, 2017, 2022,) a complexity workshop with a large Indian consultancy, two days on “Looking Differently at Development” with an Australian funder and three days on “Development and Complexity” at a NZ university. After our “Development as Risk Pooling” seminar at Massey’s Development Studies department (June 2022) a professor said “I go to conferences, read papers all the time. I seldom find new ideas. Today I did”. Yes!
My challenge is meeting participants 'where they are at' so my workshops are never one-way, output-focused didactic teaching. I typically include games, problem solving, small groups, more games, videos, debates, perhaps a little Powerpoint and did I mention games? It’s all designed to let an iterative, two way exchange of ideas and erosion of axioms unfold between us all, including me. The result? Unpredictable emergent learning - just like the rest of my work.