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Evaluation Methodology
Over the course of one week in June 2008 we—Emily Higgs and Pastor Nyatomba Emmanuel—traveled to the three camps of Nemba, Ndego and Kageyo to meet with participants and leaders. We interviewed 59 individuals, including seven AVP facilitators in Kigali, in an effort to evaluate AVP’s impact on the individuals and life in the camp. We chose individual interviews as our primary approach because this allowed us to hear personal testimony and ask follow-up questions for clarification. We also included group discussion wherever possible.
Individuals to be interviewed were selected by the leaders at each camp. With the help of FPH an individual leader in each camp was notified of our arrival plans and the AVP group to be interviewed was always gathered and ready for us when we arrived. In each camp we were able to interview an impressive group with varied and diverse backgrounds. We conducted no interviews in Nasho due to previously scheduled events there on the day we had planned to visit. Also, many of the AVP participants in Nasho had since left the camp and moved to other resettlement areas.
With one exception, the interviews were conducted via translation. The questions were translated into Kinyarwanda and the responses translated back into English and recorded by hand. After each round of interviews we discussed how to elicit thorough responses and fine-tune our questions to delve more deeply into the issues with each individual. Despite Pastor Emmanuel’s skills there are always limitations and challenges presented by translation. Certain nuances, not to mention the character and spirit of each language, are lost in the gap between translation and understanding. In an effort to minimize the loss of accurate translation we would often ask the interviewee to pause in between thoughts or sentences, so the translation would be as close to the speaker’s intention as possible and not just a summary. All of the quotations used in this evaluation appear exactly as they have been translated, though some have been edited slightly for grammar to make sure the message is clearly understood.
Access to the camps, bad roads and the distance between Kigali and each camp, negatively affected the amount of time we were able to spend at each. Consequently we were unable to spend as much time with each individual as we would have liked. However, the similarity of the responses at each camp indicates that we were getting responses that struck to the heart of the issues. We would have liked to interview more non-AVP participants in an effort to see if they had noticed any change in the camps. We were able to interview only one non-participant, a leader in Nemba, who was very attuned to the effects of AVP in the camp. Interviewing family and friends of AVP participants would also have been helpful, not only in verifying the responses we got from those we interviewed, but to understand the broader ripple effects of AVP in each place.