Marouane Smaili, a YES 2007-2008 alumnus from Morocco, hosted by Ayusa in Tucson, AZ was one of the presenters of the YES Alumni Webinar.

How do you measure the success of your alumni projects? Are they as effective as they could be? Evaluating projects is an easy way to help improve your work in the future and clearly show the impact your projects have, which can help you gain support from funders and your community.

The YES Alumni Webinar: Project Evaluation, held on March 4, 2015 at 9:00am EST,  focused on the above questions, as well as the benefits of evaluation and professional strategies and tips for how to evaluate projects. The webinar was led by Dr. Agha Ajmal, who is a Fulbright scholar, currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Health Services Policy and Management from the University of South Carolina. Dr. Ajmal, originally from Karachi, Pakistan, has specialized in Health Program Monitoring and Evaluation, meaning that he develops evaluation frameworks and conducts cutting edge work in the area of health evaluation. He has done such work on his many publications and reports, including the Tawana Pakistan Project, for which he served as the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Research Coordinator. The project served 500,000 primary school girls in poor rural provinces of Pakistan. Throughout his career, he has also served as the Head of the Monitoring and Evaluation Unit at the Tawana Project and the Acting Head of the Community Health Integrator of the Department of Community Health Sciences at Aga Khan University. 

Marouane Smaili, YES ’08, also presented on the webinar, and provided a YES Alumni perspective to evaluation. Since he has returned form his year in the U.S., Marouane has earned a Masters in Marketing and Sales Operations at ENCG Business School in Agadir and is currently working as a Communication Officer and Project Coordinator at an NGO called Dar Si Hmad. Through his professional projects and community service initiatives, Marouane has developed various skills related to project evaluation, and has tips on how to apply them to your YES Small Grant projects. Together, Dr. Ajmal and Marouane discussed the benefits of evaluation, methods for evaluation and how to best utilize your results. 

The alumni who attended the webinar learned a lot and were very excited to start utilizing their new knowledge in their future projects. Amadu from Sierra Leone said, "Now I know that Evaluation and Monitoring are necessary for a sucessful project, and this webinar will serve as a great tool for my current project as well as for the YES alumni Sierra Leone." Another alumnus who attended said, "We have experienced a lot from this webinar, it is time to start putting it into practice!" If you missed the webinar, you can watch a recording of it on YouTube or Vimeo.