Mercy Corps Gaza’s DME department celebrates its one-year anniversary

Here I am interviewing a fisherman who's employed with our cash-for-work programme. Photo: Mercy Corps Gaza

As of this month, it has been one year since the Design, Monitoring and Evaluation (DME) department in Gaza was officially set up. It has been an exciting year, with many ups and downs and especially a lot of lessons learned. The department started off with only one person: me! One year later, I have three colleagues to help me with my responsibilities.

At the beginning, my main task was to help the cash-for-work programme team. I entered data about possible beneficiaries in our database and assisted with the selection procedure. After our cash-for-work laborers completed their work, I prepared their payments.

Now, a year after I started, there are many more tasks to complete. Together with my new colleagues, I am still spending a lot of time on data entry for the cash-for-work programme, currently funded by the European Commission’s DG for Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (ECHO). But we also play an important role in the evaluation process of our psychosocial programme. Together with Queen Margaret University in the United Kingdom, we have developed innovative participatory monitoring tools. We are collecting a large amount of baseline and end-line data from beneficiaries as well as control groups. And of course, all of this has to be analysed at the end of the programme!

In this picture, I am conducting an interview with a young man. Children have been very affected by violence in Gaza. Photo: Mercy Corps Gaza

Data collection for the psychosocial programme is currently ongoing. During field visits, I've really enjoyed seeing children so enthusiastically filling in all the questionnaires. This year, we also wrote many good success stories about Mercy Corps’ activities in Gaza. Some of them were posted on donors’ websites, while others were submitted within reports to the headquarters offices.

The last few months have been very exciting for us. We have been extra busy implementing two high-quality needs assessments. One of the assessments focused on the need for cash-for-work programmes in the Gaza Strip, while the other aimed to get detailed information about the need for psychosocial and mental health services. I worked closely with the programme teams, but was also able to work with Jenny Vaughan from the our US-based Mercy Corps team, and also collaborated with a well-known Gazan consultancy firm.

The psychosocial assessment was conducted by Jenny Vaughan who taught me a lot. My role was to facilitate six focus groups discussions, during which I asked the questions and translated the answers into English for Jenny. I also reviewed all assessment notes and provided input in the final report. One of the key findings in the assessment was that aggression and violence among children is a very big problem in Gazan families these days, and definitely something that we should address in our future programmes.

During field visits, I've really enjoyed seeing children so enthusiastically answering questions and filling in all the questionnaires. Photo: Mercy Corps Gaza

For the cash-for-work assessment, I was responsible for reviewing a first version of the report and learned a lot about the humanitarian and recovery needs in Gaza. It was very clear that our cash-for-work programmes are still needed for a large number of people — such as farmers, fishermen, women and recent school graduates.

I believe that Mercy Corps has one of the best DME strategies and some of the most effective tools available in the Gaza Strip. We have a large number of reports to show for it. It has been great to be such an important part of that process. I am inspired every time I get a chance to write a story, help in a needs assessment or evaluation, prepare new monitoring tools, or provide any other support that the programme teams may need. All of these contribute to improved measuring of impact for Mercy Corps programming, which is a crucial part of the ongoing effort to maximise the effectiveness of the work we do.

To close this year in style, we have recently been able to present some of our participatory tools during a national conference titled "20 Months after the Israeli War on Gaza: Psychosocial Impact on Palestinian Children." The conference was organised by a leading mental health organisation in Gaza and it was an honour to be invited. Our presentation was very well received by all the participants, which was confirmed a few days ago when we received yet another invitation to present our work at a large event!

It's been a lot of good work so far, and so I am sure it is going to be a busy second year for the department.