GOALS Haiti: A case study in monitoring and evaluation

As a Beyond Sport award winner, streetfootballworld member and Football for Hope-supported organisation, GOALS Haiti are thrilled to now have enough data to show exactly how their sports-for-development programmes are changing lives in Haiti every single day.

GOALS is designed to create broad, long-term changes to the health of individuals and entire communities. We invest in developing our Haitian soccer coaches into models of local leadership and believe in empowering Haitians to develop their own communities, which is why all of our coaches are from the villages where they work.

Thanks to an investment from Football for Hope via streetfootballworld, GOALS was able to spend some time collecting and analysing data to better measure the impact our programmes have on individuals and families through football. Measuring the impact of sport-for-development programmes isn’t always easy, but it’s vital to understanding how we can get better.

Using the enthusiastic teenage girls of Terrasonson as our sample group, here’s what we found:

Food security and nutrition
When the need in Haiti is so great, making a significant impact can be simple. For example, per our baseline data, all but one of the 30 young women on the Terrasonson girls team suffers from chronic food insecurity, defined by how often they are able to eat and how often they feel hungry. By coming to GOALS programmes where they receive a hot meal, girls who were previously eating only once per day are now regularly eating twice a day. Based on our height and weight measurements, one-third of the girls who were underweight at their first weigh-in moved closer towards a healthy weight during the second weigh-in.

Sexual health knowledge and behaviour
Before GOALS started working in Terrasonson, we gave the teen girls a quiz as part of our assessment. We discovered that about half of the girls felt they knew enough about sexual health (puberty issues, pregnancy and STD prevention). When we asked again at the end of the year, nearly all of them (92%) reported feeling knowledgeable about sexual health issues, 80% reported knowing how to use a condom and all of them knew why to use a condom.

Knowledge doesn’t always translate into action (how often do you floss, for example, even though you know you should?), but we’re happy to report that none of the GOALS participants in Terrasonson became pregnant this year. According to UNICEF statistics specific to Haiti, an average of 1.98 pregnancies per 30 adolescents can be expected annually. Working with boys, girls and community leaders to overcome teen pregnancies has been an ongoing challenge for GOALS.

Finally, our data showed a significant increase in awareness of gender-based violence issues. Our health outreach in partnership with Doctors Without Borders/Medicins Sans Frontieres doubled the number of youth who knew about support and care options in their communities for victims of gender-based violence.

This is a shortened version of a longer article