Program management lessons learned Sample Clauses

Program management lessons learned and recommendations When the ATA-Amka partnership broke down, we should have returned to spend considerable time in Tanzania to completely re-think the project strategy. We have remained cordial with Xxxx and continue to refer buyers to Xxxx’s trading arm, Kwanzaa, but at the time we believed that we needed to give Xxxx some space and thought it would be confrontational to meet with other groups. Although the Tanzania project has yielded results, we could have done more had we spent more time and effort re-planning. We benefit enormously from more face-to-face interaction, both between the field and home offices and between the field office and the artisans. This facilitates good quality planning and helps ensure that needs are met; the lack of face-to-face interactions is one of the reasons that some of the Tanzanian relationships have been challenging, and why sometimes field offices and the home office drift in different directions. ATA’s annual program conference, where country directors can share with each other, is being expanded in 2005 in part in response to this learning. The SME program management model was to have minimal or no in-country support. While this is possible, it takes time to build trust, staffing changes are even more challenging, and travel must not be foregone. In addition, the entrepreneur, who needs to come to the market for business reasons anyway, can combine that with project planning. ATA did not allocate enough time for this mid-term evaluation, in particular for the synthesis and writing, in a timely manner. While some learnings, such as the need for increased staff travel, was implemented immediately, the usefulness of the evaluation overall is decreased with its lateness. The formal interviews conducted by local researchers were an extraordinarily cost effective and informative way to gather information. The Mozambican and Tanzanian research assistants did not have adequate experience in interviewing techniques, and that data suffers as a result Experienced interviewers with good English and professional data analysis were well worth the expense. So much effort has been spent on raising the match funding that the next stage of the project, after year five of PAED, has not been a focus for the Mozambican staff. However, after a total of eight years, the project model needs to change, even given Mozambique’s challenges. Local staff must consider what role, if any, they wish to play, and are seriously considering forming a ...