Search for Common Ground decided in April 2004 to evaluate “Nashe Maalo”, one of its larger projects in Macedonia. Nashe Maalo (“our neighbourhood”, referred to generally as NM) is a television series aimed at promoting inter-cultural understanding among children with a view to conflict transformation. It has been running since October 1999, and is scheduled to finish at the end of 2004. Search for Common Ground commissioned this evaluation in the summer of 2004 to contribute to the organisation’s understanding and continuous learning from this type of programming as well as to expand peace-building evaluation methodology.
The evaluation was organised into two components.
- The first is based on a representative sample survey (1202 children of the age of 8-15 interviewed, plus the same number of parents, located in six regions) and a series of 16 focus group discussions led by facilitators, providing respectively an audience profile, and an account of changes in knowledge, attitudes and behaviour. The aim was to define the results achieved by the programme at the level of intended outcomes (changes in attitudes, knowledge and behaviour), using a partial baseline of the situation before the conflict drawn up by Search.
- The second component, called “Mapping of Change”, attempts to answer the “so what?” question: what wider impact do changes among children have on intercommunal relations and then on the broader conflict1? To do this the evaluation mapped the links between the project’s outcomes (intended and unintended) and changes in relations in the country. This is done by defining the extent to which new social models2 have been assimilated; the extent to which new forms of interaction have taken place; and the extent to which opportunities have been created for better relations, should the conflict escalate once more.
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