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jun00
Follow-up Cohort One Impact Results-June 2000: CSA collected Cohort 1 impact data in 18 partnership and 18 comparison communities during June 2000, using the ‘Best Practices’ Assessment instrument. This external data collection was performed by teams of District Monitoring Assistants (DMAs) in the same way that the ‘best practices’ data was collected in these communities during November 1998. Following are the preliminary results of the analysis of the impact data. CSA will continue to analyze the data and will post updates to this site.
Significant Improvement on ‘Best Practices’: To measure improvement on ‘Best Practices’ in Cohort One, the comparison communities are used as a control to represent the situation without any project intervention. This is because the earliest ‘Best Practices’ data available for Cohort One was collected almost one year into project interventions in November 1998. The data from June 2000 indicate that the partnership communities were performing significantly better (p<.05) than the comparison communities on 16 of the 18 ‘best practice’ objectives. This indicates substantial progress in the partnership communities since November 1998, when significant improvement was observed on only 6 of the 18 objectives.
The two objectives where no significant difference in performance was observed in June 2000 were Trust in School System and Support Girls’ Education – School Factors. In terms of girls’ education, this is not a surprising result, as there are many initiatives relating to girls’ education currently taking place in Ghana. Significantly better performance was noted in the partnership communities for Support Girls’ Education – Home Factors, which is a component more unique to the CSA project. As for Trust in School System, the frequency distributions of the comparison and partnership communities seem to indicate that the partnership communities are performing better, but the difference is not quite enough to be statistically significant. However, it can be noted that 13 of the 18 partnership communities received high performance ratings on this objective, compared to only 5 of the 18 comparison communities.
Progress Toward High Performance: It is the goal of the CSA project that high performance be observed in at least 80% of partnership communities in nine focus areas: Empowerment, Gender, Management, Participation, Partnerships, Quality, Resources, Transparency, and Trust. The data from June 2000 indicate that we have met this goal for 7 of the 9 focus areas, with 88.9% (16 out of 18) of communities scoring high performance for Empowerment, Gender, Quality, Partnerships, and Participation. For Trust and Management, 83.3% (15 out of 18) of communities scored in the high performance range. In November 1998, the goal had not been met for any focus area, with the highest percentage at that time being Empowerment at 66.7% (12 out of 18) of communities.
The two focus areas where the goal was not met, Resources and Transparency, also had the lowest performance in November 1998. High performance in both of these focus areas has increased from 22.2% to 72.2% for Resources and from 5.6% to 66.7% for Trust. This is substantial improvement, but with initial levels so low, the improvement was not quite enough to meet the CSA goal. Sustainability: The CSA project measures sustainability using an index which can range from 0.0 to 1.0. An index of 0.6 or higher indicates at least moderate sustainability potential for a community. It is the goal of the CSA project that all communities reach this moderate sustainability level before the end of the project interventions.
The data from June 2000 indicate that this goal has been met for 14 of the 18 (77.8%) communities, as compared to 2 of the 18 (11.1%) in November 1998. Over this time period, all but one of the communities have improved their indexes (indicating movement toward higher sustainability levels), but 4 have not improved enough to reach the moderate sustainability range. Two of the four communities, Oda Ridge and Fufuo, scored in the low sustainability range, but the other two, Ongwa and Nyankomase, indicated no sustainability potential.
Appendix A. Charts
High Performance in CSA Focus Areas-Cohort One
Sustainability Index for Cohort One Partnership Communities
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