Street Business School is committed to lasting, positive change in the lives of the women we train. To ensure that our program meets the needs of entrepreneurs worldwide, we continually monitor and evaluate program performance and participant satisfaction. SBS’ monitoring and evaluation standards encompass two broad categories of analysis to assess program efficacy and fidelity of the training approach. What we learn from these analyses informs continual program improvement and increases our global impact.
Evaluation Approach
SBS program performance is measured against three key elements:
- Accuracy – Accurate data collection is essential to maintaining the integrity of research, making informed programming decisions, and ensuring quality assurance. SBS uses an online data collection tool to dramatically reduce the risk of confounding data collected through unstructured methods.
- Timeliness – Data collected must be available in a timely manner and accessible to decision makers. Information is used for tracking progress, assessing outcomes, and making decisions and must be presented in a timely manner to be relevant and utilized.
- Honesty – Evaluation findings must be inclusive of data that is expected, unexpected, positive, and/or negative. SBS data collection processes ensure that program participant experience is captured regardless of whether it demonstrates progress or not.
To ensure that SBS remains an organization committed to adaptive learning, our dedication to the study of our impact is measured through two critical elements:
- Resources – Adequate human and financial resources are required to achieve high-quality program implementation. SBS ensures that all staff are qualified in their role and that they contribute experiential knowledge to robust monitoring and evaluation. Additionally, adequate ongoing funding is allocated to monitoring and evaluation of the training processes.
- Learning – Distribution of findings, incorporation of the knowledge gained, and ongoing critical reflection contribute to informed programmatic improvements. An organizational culture of learning ensures collective buy-in to M&E activities and a commitment to sharing results and contributing to the transparency of our work. SBS staff value transforming data from basic information to knowledge that leadership can utilize to continually assess overall progress and make informed decisions to improve.
Continual Improvement
Street Business School is dedicated to creating lasting impact in the world. This empowers us to evolve our training delivery model and continually improve our efforts to bring SBS to a global scale. Fueled by initial results that our programs are having a positive effect for our partners, we explore where we can streamline and strengthen our monitoring and evaluation methods to uphold the integrity of SBS implementation as the partner network expands.
For over a decade, Street Business School in Uganda has demonstrated the transformational impact of training women entrepreneurs. As we scale this impact through the social franchise model, it is important to see the same high-quality implementation of trainings to the communities where our partners work. To ensure this, we designed our monitoring and evaluation framework to not only provide useful metrics on the success of our direct implementation in Uganda, but also to be customizable and relevant for our partners to monitor their impact within their unique context. As our partners find increasing value in using our online data collection tools, we understand our global reach with even greater accuracy.
SBS Impact Tracker
The SBS Impact Tracker is a proprietary, customized evaluation system that gathers and reports SBS impact data and program management data on a 24/7 basis, in a robust way that allows for thoughtful decision-making, critical impact evaluation, and systematic stakeholder reporting.
Each NGO partner in the SBS network is trained to use a phone/tablet-based data collection program (built on the TaroWorks platform) which feeds into the Tracker; this allows for off-line data collection in the field, that can be synced once the user has an internet connection and syncs the data to the Tracker. This saves our partners time and money in collecting and sharing the data, and ensures that we have access to it as soon as it is synced.
The SBS Impact Tracker gives us a real time global dashboard of SBS’s impact, and a way to closely monitor quality control through partner results.
In addition, we have provide each SBS NGO partner with access to a dashboard with their own beneficiary impact information, which allows them to use their data and related graphs for program improvements, donor/media reporting, and analysis. For many partners, the Impact Tracker has dramatically increased their level of M&E sophistication and provided an invaluable tool to help them grow.
SBS Impact Tracker Dashboard that shows impact across the SBS network in real time.
