Health, nutrition and protection for the most vulnerable people. Relevance, effectiveness and sustainability of an Intersos project, before the changes of August 15th
We publish the evaluation of the project “Provision of essential and quality services through an integrated protection, health and nutrition response for vulnerable conflict-affected population in Southern Afghanistan”, which took place between April 2020 and June 2021 in three districts of the Kandahar province and in a district of the Zabul province. The project, funded by the European Union, was an integrated intervention of health, nutrition and protection of the vulnerable population in Southern Afghanistan.
Managing projects to assist the population in a country in humanitarian crisis like Afghanistan is the basis of our daily intervention. Assessing whether our daily activities have contributed to positive change for that population is a crucial commitment to make. For this reason, we regularly carry out evaluative analyses of projects, to measure the impact of our intervention on the lives of the people we have decided to help.
The evaluation analysis conducted was qualitative: the people directly or indirectly involved in the implementation of the project were at the center of the evaluation work, with interviews and focus groups in the field. Behind the evaluation criteria such as “Relevance and Appropriateness, Effectiveness and Efficiency, Sustainability and Impact” are the questions asked in person by an expert evaluator to people who have lived daily in close contact with INTERSOS staff. The result of this work is the verification of the positive changes generated in the lives of the people we assist and of the communities, but above all the identification of the improvements to be made and the new challenges to be faced in order to guarantee a humanitarian response that is ever more effective and closer to the needs of those we assist.
The project took place before the changes in the country on August 15th, 2021. Since then, many things have changed, not our presence in Afghanistan, which has instead strengthened to cope with the collapse of the health system. Specifically, in addition to ensuring the continuation and strengthening of primary health, nutrition and protection projects in the provinces of Kandahar and Zabul, 7 new mobile clinics are being activated in the most difficult to reach areas of Kabul, to ensure basic medical care for those who otherwise he would not have access to health. From this point of view, the evaluation of what has been done in the past months represents a fundamental analysis tool to further improve the effectiveness of our intervention in the face of the complex humanitarian challenges in the country.