Learning from GALVmed’s legacy
It is standard procedure to measure the progress and effects of a project within its lifetime, or immediately thereafter. However, GALVmed’s Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) function also considers the performance of projects a few years down the line and the legacy that these projects have left behind. Did they succeed or fail in the long term? Were our underlying assumptions about sustainability correct or incorrect? And, what can we learn from what we have done before?
In 2016, GALVmed M&E assessed the economic sustainability of early GALVmed Market Development projects. We collected data on the supply and demand of Newcastle Disease (ND) vaccines in three pilot project sites five years after these projects ended. Our initial expectation is that we would be carrying out a ‘post-mortem’ looking at learning what might have failed and why in order to incorporate these learnings in future market development work. Instead, we found a remarkable degree of sustainability.
In a similar vein, we have looked backwards at previous market development initiatives such as the Protecting Livestock, Saving Human Life programme (April 2012 – March 2018) to see how work has progressed since the close of the project. Sales data between 2018 and 2019 indicates that millions of doses of ND vaccine were sold to small-scale livestock producers without funds or intervention from GALVmed.
Currently the GALVmed M&E function, in collaboration with partners, are working to model the economic impact of these sales to estimate the ensuing net economic benefit to the communities.
Written by Katharine Tjasink and Stuart Stevenson