Capacity Building and Training Development

Olympafrica Foundation

The Client

Established in 1993, the Olympafrica Foundation’s mission is to contribute to social development in Africa through sports. Its purpose is strongly aligned with the IOC’s vision and efforts to strengthen the role of sport as an important enabler of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The Foundation focuses on promoting the social development of young people, including disadvantaged groups through sport. Its initiatives, which are carried out in partnership with various
sports organisations in the region, have been implemented in some 40 centres in more than 35 African countries.

The Project

In 2023-2024, support was made available via external grants to strengthen the Foundation’s monitoring, evaluation, research and learning (MERL) capacity, beginning with the development of a robust MERL framework for the Foundation’s flagship “O!YES” programme. To improve Olympafrica’s capacity to deliver safe and inclusive community-based sport for sustainable development programs and to fully implement MERL as part of an effective project management cycle, the inFocus team was contracted alongside partner consultancy Innovative Hub for Research in Africa (IHfRA) to deliver this set of outcomes.

The Delivery

The project design involved multiple phases, interlaced deliverables, and accommodation for a handful of languages and local dialects. It hoped to deliver a fully initialised new data collection system and training materials to launch MERL practice for the immediate O!YES programme delivery in ten independent sport centres across the continent of Africa. The collaborative effort utilised the expertise and efforts of the Olympafrica team, IHfRA, and our own internal team. Working quickly to establish roles, responsibilities, and process, our collective team accomplished the following components of the project in rapid succession to deliver within a short project timeframe:

Scoping Assessment: To provide worthy recommendations, a scoping assessment was conducted to deeply understand the needs at hand and make sure any solution recommendations would prove effective and sustainable. This included a document review and conducting centre director stakeholder interviews.
Hardware and Software Recommendations: Taking all scoping information and materials into
consideration, a concise recommendation report was produced for the Olympafrica team. The report summarised the best software and hardware options compatible with the needs revealed in the scoping assessment. SurveyCTO was suggested for the software component of the MERL solution and the Samsung Galaxy Tablet Tab A8 was the recommended tablet model of choice to purchase for each centre to facilitate data collection due to its simplicity and battery life among other features.
MERL Solution Implementation: Once the decision was made by the Olympafrica team to proceed with the produced software and hardware recommendations, centre directors were instructed to purchase the Samsung tablets and a new installation of SurveyCTO was configured for the Olympafrica organisation. The purchase/ licensing processes were supported to secure platform access. The joint consulting team remained available to answer questions and facilitate the implementation. This included multiple translations of the data collection instrument to serve a diverse set of stakeholders.
Training Material Creation: Two separate training resource types were created as a part of the project. A one-hour video training session (created in English and also translated to French) was produced on the use of the Stirling Wellbeing Index tool as well as a number of general MERL topics including interviewing best practice and child safeguarding concepts when collecting data from children and youth. This video was made available to distribute to all centre directors and safeguarding officers who would be involved in the data collection process. A set of companion written guides were also produced to complement the video training. In addition, a technical how-to installation and use guide for the software and hardware was also created in English and French for distribution to all centres.
Q&A Session (and Resulting Summary Document): An online Q&A session was arranged by the
Olympafrica team and facilitated by the inFocus team to answer questions about the Stirling Wellbeing Index tool and any other MERL or technical queries raised by attending centre directors and MERL staff/ volunteers. This session was recorded for future distribution by Olympafrica. In addition, a summary FAQ document was created to summarise the questions asked during the session.

The Outcomes

It was an honour for our inFocus team to be involved in a project of this pace and caliber. Alongside a group of talented individuals from multiple other organisations, we were able to accomplish a robust MERL implementation and capacity building project in a very short period of time through effective communication and collaboration.