1. Asha West Coast Conference 20081 AfE Project Site Visits Current state, and future direction... Amit Sharma Asha SV

2. Asha West Coast Conference 20082 Motivations Assess the project and the organization Collect meaningful, quantitative, data Opportunity of understand subjective, qualitative, aspects of the project To Verify or To Validate? Or Both? …

3. Asha West Coast Conference 20083 Current state of affairs Site visits are prerequisite for new/renewal requests Well enforced policy driven by projects/treasury team(s) Mostly to verify the state of the project/organization Projects are chapter approved post factum Volunteer bottleneck Not enough volunteers to conduct site visits Coordination bottleneck Which project needs site visit and when?

4. Asha West Coast Conference 20084 Afterthought … We have general recommendations for site visits Recommendations not guidelines! http://www.ashanet.org/seattle/resources/general/sitevisitguide.htm Do we differentiate between new project vs. renewal site visit evaluation? Gauging organizational competency [for new projects] Gauge project progress and impact [for renewals] Limited or no mechanics to co-relate the project evaluation by funding chapter with the site visit assessment [?]

5. Asha West Coast Conference 20085 Afterthought … Site visit is a learning mechanism in addition to being a funding requirement Do we have sufficient measurable parameters for site visits? Specialize the recommendations Qualitative concerns/questions can be best addressed with a site visit Do we document enough to guide the site visit?

6. Asha West Coast Conference 20086 Recommendations Project steward with the chapter should define evaluation parameters for the project recommendation is to create ~5 top assessment questions that the project would be measured against Encourage NGO to participate in coming up with the evaluation questionnaire with the steward [and the chapter] We should encourage the NGO to complete the self- assessment at the end of the funding cycle Site visit volunteer should independently seek answers for the evaluations questions Allows NGO to self evaluate and AfE to evaluate the project against common agreed measurement set which is not quantitatively restricted

7. Asha West Coast Conference 20087 Recommendations Add the evaluation section to the proposals template Should be completed at the time of approval Should be added to the checklist requirement Assessment questionnaire must be created afresh at the renewal and should be appended to the proposal document OR Add a separate evaluation document for all new project All the same rules above apply A single chronological assessment document that captures perspective of both the NGO partner and Asha Evaluation questionnaire should exist in-addendum to the existing project evaluation/approval process

8. Asha West Coast Conference 20088 Recommendations Maintain a report of projects requiring site visit Projects in need of site visit should be entered into the spreadsheet Projects Coord team can coordinate with Asha-India to schedule site visits We need to make timelines more realistic for Asha-India to conduct site visits create a queue of site-visit requirements! Complimentary to spreadsheet of volunteers available for site visits [Seattle is driving this?]

9. Asha West Coast Conference 20089 Recommendations Eventually the renewal and site visit requests should come from the projects DB Site Visit dates and approval dates should be explicitly recorded and reportable Site Visit bottlenecks tend to negatively impact our SLA! Spreadsheet is complementary to the Projects DB

10. Asha West Coast Conference 200810 Future Directions … Asha Saathi Asha-India is severely strained of volunteers who can conduct site visit A handful of experienced Asha-India volunteers conduct most of the site visits Asha Saathi proposal has been in the docks for a while and needs to be re-visited Dedicated set of people for project monitoring, assessment, and evaluation Some chapters have contemplated engaging with paid project evaluations separately Ashawide discussion required!

11. Asha West Coast Conference 200811 Questions? Thank You!