By: Mr. Lionel Dau CANDO program Coordinator
The Church Agencies Network Disaster Operations (CANDO) consortium in the Solomon Islands successfully completed a three-day workshop on Monitoring, Evaluation, Action and Learning workshop held at B17, Aruligo, West Guadalcanal on Wednesday.
The workshop was facilitated by Anna Szava, from the CANDO Australia Coordination Unit and Tim Hartley from the Anglican Overseas Aid (AOA) both based in Australia.
The CANDO stakeholders are network of churches in Solomon Islands comprises of the Anglican Church of Melanesia (ACoM), South Seas Evangelical Church (SSEC), Catholic Church (CC), ADRA for Seventh Day Adventist (SDA), United Church Solomon Islands (UCSI), Solomon Islands Christian Association (SICA) and CANDO partnering People with Disabilities (PWDSI).
Mrs. Anna highlighted that the three-day workshop is aim at strengthening the CANDO partners in strengthening skills on conducting monitoring and evaluation survey, understanding of importance and ways of organizing data, strengthening skills of Analyzing data and strengthening skills on interpretation of data into reporting.
One of the workshop participants Fr. Peter Kevin from the Catholic Arch Dioceses of Malaita stated that, the Monitoring and Evaluation tool is also important for the respective church programs mission and ministries to assess the effectiveness, impacts and sustainability of the programs.
In a closing remark, the CANDO program Coordinator Mr. Lionel Dau said, the concept of monitoring and evaluation is an open-ended tool which not strictly applies for CANDO disaster READY program but can also be applied for various context and purposes in your respective church programs, Ministry and Mission to measure the progress, success and new learnings to inform the program decision making body for program improvement when necessary.
The program is supported and funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Humanitarian Partnership Program called disaster READY.