The MTN Foundation, in partnership with Trialogue, launched the MTN Awards for Social Change in 2019, to encourage and reward good monitoring and evaluation practice in the non-profit sector.143 entries were received across the three categories for this year’s MTN Award for Social Change but Primary school mathematics education and youth employment programme JumpStart walked away with the grand prize valued at R300,000.
“The judges felt that the intervention was designed with a high level of consultation and is focused on a clear problem, for which the root cause has been clearly analysed and unpacked. M&E has been embedded throughout the model to ensure that all stakeholders are able to use the feedback to make informed decisions,” said Angie Maloka of the MTN Foundation.
Dineo Motaung, Deputy Curriculum Education Specialist at Ekurhuleni South District, said “This project is having an enormously positive impact on our learners in the district,” said Motaung.On the other hand, Callen Hodgskiss, General Manager of JumpStart said “The programme was created as a CSI initiative for JumpCo. This means that data, systems and processes are central to what we do – they’re in the core of our DNA,” he said.
The Ekurhuleni South project, which is currently benefiting 22,000 foundation phase learners, is funded by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. “We’re enormously grateful to the Dell Foundation, which focuses on data-driven programmes. Their support took us to the next level in terms of how we design our M&E” said Hodgskiss, who has many years of experience as a Chartered accountant in the social justice space.
Given the fact that Last year, Jumpstart was shortlisted for the MTN award last year, the youth employment programme won because of their ME’s which rely on local youth interns who are trained to teach mathematics in under-resourced classrooms using our unique NumberSense workbooks.
The foundation of the M&E practice is a daily recording of each child’s mathematics activity.”This allows us to monitor what’s happening with each learner, how the learners are faring against the curriculum and against others in their cohort, as well as how each grade is progressing in each school. With this information, we monitor the overall progress of the project. We’ve added a digital tool that automatically syncs to the platform, which enables continuous monitoring,” added Hodgskiss.
