By Sinead Maharray, Monitoring and Evaluation Manager, Cross Country
Since 2010, Solar Sister has created a pathway to prosperity for 11,000 women entrepreneurs to bring clean energy to more than 900,000 last-mile families in three countries. Our diverse staff, scattered across five countries and three continents, tackles challenges and finds solutions as a team to make Solar Sister’s profound impact possible. Although each country has its own unique operational challenges, contexts, and nuances, we routinely come together for cross-country collaborative innovations.
In 2024, Solar Sister identified the need to refresh our baseline data collection survey for new Solar Sister Entrepreneurs to make it more efficient, ensure all questions were purposeful, and better align it with our year-end entrepreneur survey for improved comparison of outcomes over time. Knowing this survey tool is deployed in all three countries, and that staff across multiple levels of the organization had a stake in its development, Solar Sister initiated a collaborative, iterative process for updating and rolling out a new and improved data collection tool.
The core Baseline Survey Redesign team included Solar Sisters cross-country Impact Hub members and the Monitoring and Evaluation Manager from each country. Through a two-month iterative process, the team garnered buy-in on the new tool and its importance from staff across the organization, which contributed to the successful implementation of the final result. The team worked together through weekly virtual meetings to revise, update, and restructure the survey questions, frequently seeking feedback on the survey updates throughout the process from the field staff (Business Development Associates) in all countries to ensure contextual alignment, eliminate language and cultural barriers, and guarantee an intuitive user experience. Final decisions were made together in a consensus-seeking process, with all members contributing to the ultimate answer. Team members were both supported and accountable to distant colleagues in other countries with similar expertise and roles but different contexts and challenges.
The redesigned Entrepreneur Baseline survey allows Solar Sister to collect important, relevant information on the demographics and livelihoods of Solar Sister entrepreneurs, allowing us to more effectively track their growth over time. This tool significantly improves Solar Sister’s impact assessment abilities, and due to the collaborative approach taken in its development, the tool is contextually appropriate, relevant to the lives of our entrepreneurs, and well-understood by those implementing it. This is only possible because Solar Sister took the intentional approach of ensuring that colleagues working in different contexts and different communities were empowered to bring their insights and expertise to a collaborative setting and comfortable enough to ask for feedback and support in that same setting.
Our Team:
Mulika Audu, M&E Manager for Nigeria, manages and executes M&E components of all Solar Sister Nigeria projects to ensure the desired outcomes are achieved. She began her career with Solar Sister Nigeria as a BDA in 2018 before transitioning to the M&E role, and her extensive field experience was extremely valuable in the redesign of the survey.
Roselinder Maima, M&E Manager for Kenya, is tasked with monitoring and evaluating the various programs at Solar Sister Kenya, as well as managing communications efforts for her team. Roselinder’s skillset in gathering feedback from beneficiaries and using it to inform decision-making has been an incredible asset for engaging stakeholders throughout this process.
Sinead Maharrey, M&E Manager, manages Solar Sister’s M&E efforts across the three countries and supports facilitation of cross-country M&E initiatives.
Natasha Wheatley, Impact Hub Director, leads Solar Sister’s shared support services, providing support on M&E, data systems, technology, and training for staff across the organization.
Neema Mkinga, Data and Systems Manager for Tanzania, supports the Tanzania team on data collection and management, and also leads their customer service operations. Her direct contact with Solar Sister Entrepreneurs on a daily basis and her understanding of Solar Sister’s data collection policies and procedures were a helpful guide as we trained staff on how to implement the new tool.