Corporal Salvador do Santos at the M&E workshop. Photo: CWS
Expecting 20 people at most to join a Monitoring & Evaluation training workshop recently, CWS staff in Timor Leste were pleased to welcome 25 and to hear Corporal Salvador do Santos, who is a medic in the national army (F-FDTL), talk about why he and others joined the workshop. “In fact, I have never had any specialized education or training for monitoring and evaluation or data analysis like this. Not only is solid M&E helpful in my HIV education and prevention work with my fellow soldiers and their families; M&E is relevant to so many other health and medical issues, which I need to know. Learning more about information and data analysis will also help me teach my students at the University of Dili – and help them understand how important M&E is for knowing if we are making progress, or not, in our work. For example, the F-FDTL HIV education and prevention program with CWS has been running for about six years; and, to see results – and improve the initiative from past successes and failures – we monitor and evaluate routinely, and improve our efforts all the time”.