Theme Meeting on Evaluation and Monitoring, 30 June-4 July 2003, Vienna, Austria
How do you know your prevention programme is making a difference?
We have discussed many times and in many different ways about what needs to be done to prevent drug abuse among young people ? So, we decided to think about how we can know that what we do really makes a difference. On 1-5 July 2003, we invited 11 organizations from 11 countries from around the world to Vienna to discuss how young people can monitor and evaluate their own drug abuse prevention programmes.
The invited organizations were all part of the Global Youth Network and the UNDCP/WHO Global Initiative on Primary Prevention of Substance Abuse. Earlier, these organizations had replied to our call of interest and told us about their experiences in monitoring and evaluating their prevention activities.
On the basis of these short descriptions and of a review of the available literature, Richard Ives from Educari, UK, prepared the first draft of the 'hands on' guide that we want to develop and publish as a result of this process. The guide is intended for youth groups and community-based organizations that work to prevent substance abuse among young people and who want to effectively monitor and evaluate their work. We want the guide to show that monitoring and evaluating does not have to be difficult and threatening but can be easy and, above all, useful.
As is our wont, this time we played around with the structure of the meeting to see if we could get everyone really involved with the process. We also gave them some major homework. All participants had to review the draft guide based on their experience before they came to Vienna for the meeting and were expected to spend the four days discussing the draft.
They took it apart, suggested many different ways of rewriting it, provided concrete examples of things that worked and other that did not work, added entire chapters and took away many others. Richard is presently working on the guide to include all of these suggestions, so that it can be published soon.
If you would like to know more about this work, please contact Gautam Babbar, Giovanna Campello, or Jouhaida Hanano.
UNODC, Vienna