Sub-Saharan Africa - Somalia
Cowater International supported FCDO through the implementation of the Monitoring & Evaluation of FCDO’s Somalia Humanitarian Programme (MESH II). Cowater’s project monitored the 2018-2022 Somalia Humanitarian and Resilience Programme (SHARP) and the Somali Health and Nutrition Programme (SHINE) 2016-2021. The aim of MESH II was to strengthen and extend the evidence base of the impact of UK humanitarian, resilience and health action and to support adaptive programming and evidence-based decision-making. MESH II tracked and assessed the performance of FCDO Somalia humanitarian, resilience and health investments and uses data and analysis to drive performance and sustained changes across FCDO partners.
Third Party Monitoring was one of the core activities of MESH II. This included collecting partner data which shows progress against targets, call centre data representing a primary source of feedback from affected populations, and field third-party monitoring that focused on the verification of outputs across relevant partner activities. This was used to identify delivery issues including the accountability of cash-based programming, issues of staffing or supplies in health and nutrition activities, possible protection issues amongst IDPs/refugees, and others. This included fieldwork and the monitoring of over 250 health and nutrition sites and routinely entails managing upwards of 100 field staff engaged in quantitative data capture. MESH II utilized the FCDO Performance Platform, a portal for all the data that MESH collected, either from partners or from MESH independent monitoring activities and included the automated extraction of micro-level data from partners, the ability to generate graphs and other data visualisations, and links with targets related to the FCDO programme as a whole.