Since April 2014, INTRAC has been working with Mary’s Meals to provide an external review and quality assurance of the design, methodology and implementation of impact assessment of their school feeding programmes in Malawi, Zambia and Liberia. INTRAC is providing technical support to the internal evaluation team to ensure the robustness of the methodology, the quality of the data collection processes, the reliability of the data analysis and, finally, verification of the findings.
So far, baselines have been conducted in Zambia, Malawi and Liberia and a second round of data collection has also been completed in all three countries using a quasi-experimental methodology. Schools were selected using a stratified random sampling methodology based on geography and school type.
Data is being collected via individual and household surveys and focus groups from three sample groups:
- Pre-feeding schools (Children, teachers and volunteers)
- Control group schools not included in Mary’s Meals Programme (Children and teachers)
- Existing schools which have been receiving feeding for several years (Teachers)
INTRAC consultants’ role to date has included:
- advising on the sampling methodology
- supporting design and field testing of data collection instruments
- review/ quality assurance of data analysis process
- evaluation of quality of the data, via field visits to Malawi, Zambia and Liberia
- providing feedback on the impact assessment report for Malawi
- validation of the whole impact assessment exercise