Monitoring and Evaluation

Calcutta Kids values each encounter with an expecting mother and with a child as an opportunity to positively impact that person’s life. Each child and mother we can treat, each person whose learning capacity we can strengthen, each person whose dignity we can help to restore is an accomplishment we celebrate.


At the same time, we recognize that our population will be well-served by more formal measures of success. The Maternal and Young Child Health Initiative is carefully monitored and evaluated with survey tools designed to measure demographics, knowledge, attitudes, practices, and health outcomes for the catchment population in Fakir Bagan. The project aims to assess the quality of staff work with each mother we counsel, keep accurate records of the number of children for whom we provide services, and record the number of prenatal and postpartum care sessions provided to pregnant women. Calcutta Kids conducted a baseline survey of 500 households in Fakir Bagan in early 2006. After three years, the organization will conduct an end-line survey designed to assess the initiative’s impact on maternal and young child health, and specifically on the extent to which sustained interaction with Community Health Workers, counseling about best prenatal and young child health practices, and appropriate medical care (including hospitalization for high-risk pregnancies plus immunizations for young children)

• Decreased the high infant and maternal mortality and morbidity rates
• Increased birth weight
• Facilitated a stronger local awareness of prenatal and best infant health practices.

The evaluation tools will also be used to determine the extent to which Measles, Tuberculosis, Respiratory Infections, Vitamin A Deficiency and Diarrhea can be expected to decrease in Fakir Bagan with proper care.


In addition to the evaluation surveys, the Project Coordinator is responsible for quality assurance that can pinpoint weaknesses in health education, service delivery, and counseling. Community meetings are regularly held with Fakir Bagan’s pregnant women, at which participants are asked about the services they receive and where feedback is sought on which components of the initiative are considered most effective and which need improvement. Information from these sources are used, turn, to make adjustments in, for example, the activities of Community Health Workers involvement, or the types of counseling information that are made available and the manner in which it is presented.


Over the past few years, Calcutta Kids’ programs have demonstrated that a small, community-based organization has the potential to make a significant difference in the lives of its beneficiaries. Between September 2002 and September 2004, for example, Calcutta Kids’ mobile health clinic provided over 7,000 free medical check-ups to street children, with free long-term care offered if needed. At the same time, with the help of a strong monitoring and evaluation system – and with a commitment to utilize our data on an ongoing basis to improve program operations, Calcutta Kids realized that it was not meeting its objectives in terms of health status improvement. The organization, accordingly, shifted its primary focus from older child health care to maternal and infant health care, recognizing the vital importance of addressing health status from the points of pregnancy and birth.


In our new programs, we are continuing to use monitoring and evaluating techniques, indeed even more rigorously than before. Preliminary results from the now two year-old Maternal and Young Health Child Initiative indicate that we are well on our way to meeting our objectives for that initiative and, in turn, significantly affecting the lives of individuals and families in our community. Birth weights of infants born to participating young mothers, for example, now average 2.8 kg, a remarkable improvement from the 1.8 kg average found at baseline. This reduction in low birth weight is critical in ensuring a healthy start for children anywhere, and particularly in a precarious environment. Our organization is proud of the coverage and quality of the services and health counseling it is providing, and our ability to maximize resources with a small budget.


If the end-line survey completed after three years reveals a significant improvement in the health and health knowledge of the community it serves, Calcutta Kids envisions making the Maternal and Young Child Initiative a cornerstone of its programming. It also will examine means by which the successful activities of our organization might be replicated in other contexts.

The Database

To further facilitate effective monitoring and evaluation, Calcutta Kids is in the process of addressing an opportunity only very recently available to small NGOs around the world: the creation of a system for local implementation of data usage through a secure web-based database system. Such a system, we believe, will play a vital role in tracking and evaluating program activities in real time. While most monitoring and evaluation activities follow a progression of data collection, data cleaning, data analysis and then reports leading to proposed policy changes – this often taking many months, this new process will allow for continuous, ongoing data analysis. Some of the most exciting attributes of this project are:

• Automatically generated worksheets identifying for the project coordinator which pregnant women need to be visited, which children need immunizations this week, and which women are behind schedule for antenatal care check-ups. With this information, Calcutta Kids will also be able to identify the reasons behind any low levels of participation, and to adjust service delivery so the targeted population will be more inclined to participate.
• The web-based database will facilitate data analysis by external evaluators which is valuable periodically. The organization, accordingly, can receive expert advice without having to bring the data experts to Calcutta – at large expense to the organization. Such data can easily be transferred to a statistical computer program for proper, user-friendly analysis.
• The database will have automatically generated alarms to alert Calcutta Kids project staff to women and children in need. For example, if a child is growth faltering, an alarm would indicate that this child needs additional attention, either through nutrition rehabilitation, or simply more counseling for the caretaker on nutritious foods.
• The database will be fully compatibility with hand-held computer devices that will soon be utilized by all of our Community Health Workers to facilitate data entry.