Monitoring and Evaluating Youth Substance Abuse Prevention Programmes
12
Example of a baseline assessment
Jadranka was setting up a new project to support young people in the local school through
information and counselling. Her donors had set her some targets to achieve, for example,
an increase in the students’ awareness of the local substance abuse service. Before she
started her work, she decided to measure the young people’s awareness of the service, so
she prepared a questionnaire and distributed it to a sample of the school’s students. It
also asked about some other things she was required to target, such as awareness of the
effects of different kinds of substance. A year later, just before she wrote her annual
report, she repeated the questionnaire survey and compared the results with her baseline
assessment.
This example is invented, but is based on actual practice.
Sometimes a needs assessment is conducted before a project starts. A needs assessment is
different from a baseline assessment, because it is an assessment of the situation in order to
decide what to do. A needs assessment identifies what the problem is, what resources already
exist and where the gaps are. It identifies what needs might or should be met by a project. It
should always take into consideration the results of the monitoring and evaluation of previous
projects. It might be that some of the information you collect for your needs assessment could
be used as your baseline, for example, how many young people of which age are abusing
substances, but this is not necessarily the case.
From all of this, something very important follows. As far as possible, you need to start to
evaluate your project, that is, through a baseline assessment, before you start the implementation
of your activities, not after. Let’s say you have decided what your project will do (your activities)
and what its aim or purpose would be [your objective(s)]. Ideally, you will have decided this on
the basis of a needs assessment. We certainly recommend that you do.
*
Then, before you begin
implementation, you will need to collect the information that will become the baseline against
which you will assess whether you have achieved what you wanted to achieve. Most probably
you will find that you already have some of this information from the needs assessment, but
that you need to collect some more to have a proper baseline. You begin implementation only
after you have collected this information. We are aware that this might not always be possible
and that, in fact, you might be reading these lines while in the middle of implementation and
wondering “Does this mean I cannot evaluate my activities at all?” No, it does not mean this.
We discuss some other possibilities in chapter 6, section D, Evaluation.
However, you should be aware of another important point. An evaluation including a baseline
assessment will only tell you that there has been a change in the situation of your target
group. To be able to say that this change has been due to your project, you will need to
*See United Nations, Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, A Participatory Handbook for Youth Drug Abuse
Prevention Programmes: a Guide for Development and Improvement (United Nations publication, Sales No. E.02.XI.10)
(http://www.unodc.org/youthnet/pdf/ handbook.pdf); World Health Organization, Primary Prevention of Substance Abuse:
a Workbook for Project Operators (http://www.unodc.org/youthnet/global_initiative/pdf/initiative_activities_workbook.pdf);
and World Health Organization, Primary Prevention of Substance Abuse: a Facilitator Guide (http://www.unodc.org/
youthnet/global_initiative/pdf/iniative_activities_facilitator_guide.pdf).