Authors
Dr. Yitbarek Woldetensay, Developmental Evaluation Lead – Disaster Risk Management; Rebecca Herrington, CEO of Headlight Consulting Services; Chelsie Kuhn, Collaborating, Learning, Adapting, Monitoring, and Evaluation (CLAME) Specialist and Developmental Evaluation Administrator Lead; and Alison Harrell, CLAME Specialist and Developmental Evaluation Administrator
Description
The United States Forest Service (USFS) implemented the National Incident Management System (NIMS) program in Ethiopia for 12 years, and the program was phased out in March 2023. NIMS intended to strengthen the disaster risk management (DRM) capacity of the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) by integrating the relevant components of the NIMS into the Ethiopian DRM system. The selected priority NIMS components included Multi-Agency
Coordination (MAC), Emergency Operations Center (EOC), Incident Command System (ICS), and Comprehensive Emergency Preparedness and Response Planning.
As part of its final evaluation, USFS planned to implement a Most Significant Change (MSC) study to capture the program’s impact on its beneficiaries, predominantly DRM institutions. Realizing that traditional, quantitative data collection methods would not capture the full breadth of significance that the program had and with the limitations of the available time, USFS selected
MSC as the best approach available to gather qualitative data regarding NIMS contributions. Moreover, MSC is a use-focused approach as it is a participatory form of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) often used to evaluate complex situations. It traditionally involves gathering stories of significant change from project stakeholders to make sense of a project’s, program’s, or activity’s
implementation.
This evaluation was conducted for USFS and the USAID/Ethiopia Strengthening Disaster Risk Management – Systems and Institutions (SDRM-SI) project team by Headlight Consulting Services, LLC (referred to as Headlight or the evaluation team throughout the report) as a part of the SDRM-SI Developmental Evaluation (DE).
View resource: USFS NIMS Most Significant Change_Final Report_05112023
