Genesis is MEL partner to Helmsley Trust children projects
The Leona M and Harry B Helmsley Charitable Trust’s (Helmsley Trust’s) Vulnerable Children in Sub-Saharan Africa Programme funds interventions that provide at-risk children with greater access to education, improved nutrition, and clean water and sanitation.
Genesis has been Helmsley Trust's monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) partner since 2014. Over this period Genesis has provided quality assurance, evaluation and learning support to the trust across a number of grantees.
Our learning partnership began with providing quality assurance support to CRS (Catholic Relief Services) Ghana and Nuru Kenya. In this role, Genesis reviewed the projects' monitoring systems and visited the project sites to understand the projects and their monitoring systems in practice.
On the basis of this, Genesis provided the projects with recommendations on how to improve their M&E systems so that they delivered consolidated and evidence-based reporting to inform decision-making and project implementation. Additionally, Genesis provided recommendations on the implementation of the projects, identifying areas for improvement and course correction.
Genesis subsequently conducted implementation and summative evaluations that reviewed the implementation of the projects and provided recommendations on how they could be more effectively implemented to achieve their objectives and identified key learnings for future programming.
Genesis was subsequently contracted to review the M&E frameworks and activities of a Water.org project in Kenya and a World Vision project in Ethiopia. The assignment included a document review and a project visit, which informed a project scoping report. Genesis documented the projects' existing M&E frameworks and activities, identified gaps and presented recommendations to improve the implementation of the projects and their M&E systems. These recommendations were also used to inform the development of a M&E manual for future HCT grantees.
Genesis was then contracted to conduct an implementation and a summative evaluation of projects implemented by Water.org in Ghana and Kenya. The implementation evaluation focused on the first two years of the projects. The outcome of this evaluation was a set of recommendations to Water.org's partners and Water.org itself to consider how to improve implementation. The summative evaluation focused on understanding the performance and impact of the projects over the grant period and the sustainability of the project interventions.
Drawing on this experience, Genesis was asked to conduct a landscape study to review the state of health and healthcare in Ethiopia, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Zambia. This landscape study aimed to inform the trust's future grant-making strategy in pursuit of its overarching objective to make a significant impact on the health of vulnerable children in these countries. Genesis was further contracted to support the design of the second phase of its portfolio funding strategy in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Genesis is providing Helmsley Trust with monitoring support for End Fund’s Trachoma Surgery project in Ethiopia and Nuru's project in Ethiopia. This includes desktop reviews and site visits to understand the projects' implementation and provide recommendations for future implementation. Genesis also provides support to a new WaterAid grant in Zambia. Here Genesis identified learnings from a previous Helmsley grant that should be taken into account for the implementation of the new WaterAid grant in Zambia. Last, Genesis is working with Nuru International to identify learnings from its Nuru Nigeria grant that are of relevance for implementing projects in conflict affected areas.