American Century Investments has been in partnership with Able Child since 2017 and has been a major contributor to our capacity-building work with our partner UWEZO.
Paul Harrison, Head of EMEA Client Business at American Century Investments, and President and Chair of the Board of the US Friends of Able Child Africa, spent a week with UWEZO Youth Empowerment (UWEZO) in 2019 to support them in this area. Through their funding and volunteer time, they have been a major contributor to our capacity-building work.
Working closely – UWEZO’s recent success has meant an increasing portfolio of programmatic work along with considerable organisational growth in a short space of time. This poses a unique set of risks and with the support from American Century we have been able to work closely with UWEZO and support them in exciting transition.
Using our expertise – one area UWEZO had recognised they needed to improve was their monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) systems in order to be able to effectively meet the expectations of larger grants. This included the need to develop new tools, with a focus on better capturing the voices of project beneficiaries. Using our expertise we designed a package to build their capacity in this area.
Paul from American Century travelled to Rwanda and delivered a number of focused training to the UWEZO team supporting them to implement data collection procedures.
Improving understanding – UWEZO has since become our first partner to use the ‘Washington Group Short Set of Questions’ – a set of questions designed to identify people with a disability during data collection. With few organisations using this as a method to consistently disaggregate data in this way, this has really set UWEZO apart. To date, the results speak for themselves. UWEZO’s overall knowledge and understanding has improved significantly, fully meeting the requirements of donors and ensuring that the voices of children with disabilities are included in the evaluation of the projects we deliver together.
We’re thrilled – with what our partnership with American Century Investments has managed to achieve and we’re looking forward to working on similar projects with them in the future.
