jeph mathias

Larger Projects

Across the wide span of my work look for these recurrent  themes:  interaction between different levels and groups of humanity, complexity, inclusion and  relationship between people and planet and participatory approaches. They appear and reappear in myriad guises

2024 2024 2024 2024 2024 2024

Programme Evaluation in India- tracking values

A fascinating challenge was to work with a highly values driven agency in India. They do not implement anything, rather choosing, funding and relating deeply to partners over their project cycles. The ToR had the usual myriad DAC questions buy when I sent a confidential quiz to key team members finishing with “in one sentence what is this evaluation about” they all said in different words, “its about seeing how our values are represented by other’s actions, how and why”. Interesting . So I spent weeks in India tracking values, where they had come from and why they were being demonstrated. It was super inrtreresting and highly rewarding.

Remote OH Nepal- unravelling policy

A project done from New Zealand was an Outcome harvest to unravel the input of an NGO particularly to policy around reproductive rights in Nepal. Perhaps the biggest learning for me was a nuanced view of where contribution to policy change is possible. Of course direct inputs to law makers , working groups on policy etc.. are a ay to contribute to policy. This NGO did this very well, often in coalition with others working for similar changes. They also contributed to policy by working with local governments on availability and payment for services, with medical staff on skills, with pharmacists on supply chains for medications and even directly with women to explain possibilities and create an appetite for change. I finished this evaluation seeing contributions to policy as on a continuum from direct input to law to contextual contributions which enable changes to happen

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Participatory OH, MHP Afghanistan

Perhaps my most fulfilling OH yet was three weeks in Afghanistan with a mental health project in Herat.This was a second visit to a project I visited in 2017 and helped redesign , transforming a high quality tertiary hospital into 5 integrated community health projects. Six years later I worked with a team of 10 men and 10 women to gather 470 Outcome stories and 1600 outcomes. The evaluation results were spectacular and working with a team of wonderfully skilled people from Afghanistan was fabulous. I got onto a plane in Kabul totally knowing that working with women in Afghanistan on community mental health contributes more to the world of my skills than being an emergency doctor in New Zealand.

2023 2023. 2023 2023 2023 2023 2023

Participatory OH, Pathway Trust,

This was a participatory OH really pushing the boundaries. The programme rehabilitates high security prisoners in Ōtautahi New Zealand and we had a team of current prisoners, ex prisoners and corrections staff as the Evaluation team. Perhaps the biggest novelty was having prisoners and corrections staff defining the evaluation questions. It really was their evaluation. They also conducted interviews and uploaded material onto an electronic database and did qualitative coding themselves. This is evaluation as an intervention. Hugely rewarding.

OH RE Blend

I am currently working with a team from Charles Darwin University in Melbourne including well known realist researcher and thinker Gill Wethorop. The conceptual thrust of this collaboration is to define a blend between Outcome Harvesting and Realist Evaluation. We are working our way through the intersections and philosophical differences between the two approaches. Practically we have developed a methodology that usefully blends the thinking and techniques of both approaches and are using that in an evaluation with a funder and an intermediary organistation trying to affect teh space between health and justice systems in Australia. Fascinating + challenging = Fun.

STGM Turkey

Mariam Smith and I are working remotely with an NGO In Turkey trying to expand the space and scope for civil society actors in Turkey. It’s a highly complex area- how to “democratise” a country from within? Really enjoyable to work on such important things, to work alongside Mariam and to work with an organisation fist sensitised to Outcome Mapping through the OMLC workshop in Brussels in 2019. Mariam and I are doing this as OMLC stewards contracted for bespoke work through OMLC.

PAMI, Guatemala,

This is an OM project in Guatemala which seeks empowerment of youth to contribute to changes in the world they experience. I love it that the funder (Taksvaarki, Finland) is concerned with youth participation and does not mandate what they should be working on. They’re funding process (Youth contributing to their own future) not product (the exact output of their activities). I led this remotely from New Zealand- Guatemalan youth did the OH, recorded and analysed in Excel and designed their own monitoring system. Really pushed my Spanish to explain pivot tables in Spanish. :-)

OH with SRSP

This was a large OH with a highly efficient organisation in Pakistan. We worked as a team gathering 460 stories from all parts of “the system’ in NW FP Pakistan relevant to the resettlement of people displaced by violence . I worked remotely from New Zealand throughout while the SRPS collected 460 stories. WE coded together as a team on an electronic platform and I analysed 2700 Excerpts and 8500 code applications all linked to 28 descriptors. This was a huge project but was done at a very high quality. Outcome harvesting was a way to let the system tell us what really works for people displaced by violence. For me it was step up in analysis.

2022 2022 2022 2022 2022 2022

I continued to evaluate throughout 2021 but various life issues made it difficult for me to maintain the website. I am now back into it.

COVID COVID COVID COVID

OH exercise, Dhulabari, Nepal. Working with a team I have previously worked with trying to get a broad understanding of what outcomes are, harvesting them around a system and putting the ideas together to understand where and what change might be happening and where it might be happening with slightly different strategy.

Project design Nairobi- a follow on from my evaluation last year with a programme focused on street youth. In a workshop scenario I worked with street youth and NGO looking at teh system we are workmen in, where we might want to contribute to change and what stragetegies we might use to implement those changes.

Stories of Change, Nairobi a three day workshop in Kenya with a coalition of women’s development organisations looking at what change is and how to tell a story that connects a distant funder to real changes on the ground via partner organisations and their strategies. I worked with professional visual storyteller Jamie Chan on this project

2020

2019

Evaluation of Child rights Programme, Cambodia. A participatory outcome harvest of a child rights programme in Rural Cambodia. was a fascinating mix of behaviour and perspectives of children, families, teachers, principals, other NGOs, government education department, and communities.

Mental Health and Gender Based Violence project, India. I am involved in design and set up of a cutting edge project in a strongly caste dominated rural part of Nuorth India. We are using Outcome Mapping and participatory thinking to set up and start this project.

Assessing Rural Livelihoods, India. In the first week of December I am assessing how a multidimensional project related to rural livelihoods, health , disabled children, agriculture and education has influenced systemic change in a remote Himalayan valley in India.

2019

Outcome Harvest Indonesia- An interesting project looking at what changes have emerged from the Sports for Development programme of an organisation that works with and for People Living with HIV in Indonesia. Unravelling complex issues related to reduction fo stigma and inclusion in society for marginalised people. There is no formal way to measure stigma. We approached the question via outcomes.

Remote Outcome Harvest  Pakistan. I from  New Zealand and 7 members of an excellent team in Pakistan did an Outcome  Harvest of their work in Pakistan. Many dimensions, a wide range of activities and a huge geographical range was analysed by 1059 Outcome stories, coded and analysed with  Dedoose, an electronic database. 

Outcome Harvest, Cambodia. A mid term review of a project I have worked with previously, done as an outcome harvest. Fascinating review because essentially we found that the organisation is working very well, its boundary partners are changing and community members lives are being transformed but simultaneously the world is changing so that  its excellent work is almost irrelevant. Needs a new boundary...

OM Workshop Bangkok - Facilitated a 3 day workshop in OM with two other community stewards, Mariam Smith and Simon Hearn. Great group of participants and super venue and hosting my RECOFTC

2018

2017

Taking Mental Health to the community, Afghanistan. I used systems thinking and Outcome Harvesting philosophy to evaluate a mental health clinical service provider. It is of high quality and well managed but runs parallel to government, has access barriers and, most importantly, does not touch social determinants which are the major driver of mental health issues in Afghanistan (and the rest of the world). Recognising this we started defining a pathway towards an adaptive, complexity aware community mental health project integrated with clinical services. Mapping out a viable future pathway is "evaluating what is not here, but might be"- a wonderful challenge! I hope to continue being involved with this excellent project and the radical transition of its vision and directions.  Update- August 2017 The project requested I assist with design of the new project which will dive Ito the complex and chaotic world outside the clinic doors. Because of security concerns in Afghanistan the team came here to Mussoorie where we had 8 wonderful days of project design and learning which Included 3 field trips. I look forward to seeing how the project evolves from here.   

 Monitoring System for Community Mental Health, India A project in Uttarakhand is trying to build "community mental Health Resilience"- a concept that is  hard to formally define but for me understandable and coherent. I am working with four teams of community health workers and their M and E officer to develop a system to monitor this almost indefinable concept. We will use alot of narrative collected by community workers  and other staff as well as a qualitative research database in the cloud. I love the intangible-but-coherent nature of the challenge and the range of methods from simple stories in Hindi to latest IT technology, perhaps in javascript.

Outcome Harvest Cambodia. Outcome harvesting is having a conversation with a context. A conversation unlike an interview or an interrogation is a gentle, open ended process. Two really enjoyable features of this harvest were the participation of 8 community and NGO staff members and NVivo, a qualitative research package. I felt I got the richness of local Cambodians listening to stories from the context combined with the information processing and storage capabilities of computer software. It was a really enjoyable evaluation. 

 Outcome based livelihood project, Indian Himalayas - I evaluated this project 3 years ago, helped develop a new OM design and now accompany them towards recognising, capturing and responding to outcomes in their integrated livelihood and environment project. I really enjoy following the outworking of our OM design over time, to a new project area and watching  team culture evolve towards an outcome focus. 

Expedition Medicine workshop. Nepal.  I presented a workshop on Expedition Medicine to doctors At the Asia Pacific Travel Medicine conference,  Kathmandu, March 2016. Not development  but good  fun creatively presenting  ideas and concepts. 

Development in Complexity Workshop, New Zealand - an 'ideas’ workshop for academics, funders, grassroots workers and government staff. Our  three days of fun together went from complexity theory to throwing balls at each other to designing  complex projects ourselves. 

2016

2015

Conference Presentation, New Zealand -  As a Dev. Studies research fellow I wrote and presented “Development as regime shift” looking at the meaning of development and pathway to its achievement.

Interactive Course in Complexity, Chang Mai, Thailand. Asked to give theoretical and practical approaches for an organisation with a very complex context in the Thai/Myanmar border areas.

Outcome Harvest, Cambodia - An intense and particularly challenging evaluation in North –East Cambodia with an NGO working entirely with indigenous people of three different language groups in a rapidly changing context. Complexity personified, this was perhaps my most enjoyable evaluation to date. 

Mentoring New Zealand Development Studies Masters students. on project design  in India and  evaluation in Cambodia. 

Community Mental health competence, North India - I worked on design and now monitoring  and evaluation with a mental health project aiming for outcomes around community inclusion of poor and mentally unwell people in North India. I have long term involvement with this outcome mapping project, trying to build skills in harvesting outcomes at many levels and integrating them into work. I am now working on a monitoring system with their field workers using tablets to capture and process key changes and integrate them into the project. 

Outcomes and Complexity Workshop, India - A Bangalore development consultancy asked for an interactive workshop on complexity and outcome based thinking in development. 

Assessment- Indigenous Health and Conservation, North-East India - I assessed NGOs working with indigenous people, their land, rights and trajectories for an international funder about which projects they might accept and what made them suited to their vision and their  context. 

Design with a Rights Based Organisation, Orissa, India.. A rights based organisation moving to a more complexity nuanced approach to social change for communities in Orissa. Worked with them adn funder on an Outcome mapping design and monitoring system. 

Child Marriage, India -  An initiative out of TISS (a high quality social sciences institute). The design and monitoring system for a large international project trying to affect change around forced and child marriage in the poorest sates of India is my brief.  I love working at the academic/thinking end of this large, ambitious, important project.

Snow Leopard Conservation, India - Conservation concepts and biology: Participatory snow leopard conservation is a dynamic interaction of biology,  Himalayan people, land, climate, policy…I also ran an alpine skills and wilderness medicine course for field staff.

“Definition to Design,” with a Leprosy NGO, Nepal - An interactive week went from philosophy and self definition with this leading  NGO to OM design and strategies with the NGO and its partners (including government). In a fascinating progression from pathogen to people we shifted focus from leprosy to social context -stigma, marginalisation, livelihood and disability . Including partners in design workshops hugely assists  good design and acceptance of new methodologies and thinking. Negotiating values, philosophies, protocols and styles within and beyond the NGO was complex  and enjoyable in the extreme. That that they've now presented their OM design to an " OM sensitised"  government department is tremendously satisfying.  

Conference Presentations, USA. I was part of two panels, one on Outcome Mapping and one on Outcome Harvesting at the important American Evaluation Association Conference in Chicago, Nov. 2015. I loved throwing ideas around at a major international conference and was pleased that our presentations generated lots of interest.