Measuring Impact in Time of Crisis - Monitoring & Evaluation

ISSA Member: International Step by Step Association ISSA, partners and members, International

What happened?
Following the onset of the war in Ukraine, ISSA Members worked to ensure that early childhood interventions were not only delivered but also measured for impact. In several municipalities across Members’ countries, using the Primokiz methodology, local action teams implemented situation analyses, needs assessments, and participatory processes to capture the real effects of their crisis-response work with young children, parents, and practitioners.

What was needed? How did they respond?
There was an urgent need for reliable, real-time data to understand how war, displacement, service disruption, and new interventions were affecting young children’s learning, well-being, and access to services.

ISSA Members responded by designing and conducting local situation analyses in municipalities, documenting service availability, capacity gaps, and family needs. In addition, training programs for ECD staff were paired with pre- and post-assessments to measure knowledge gains and inform follow-up support.

Key challenges:

• Inconsistent or missing local data on young children’s access to services.
• Limited capacity at municipal level to systematically collect and analyse feedback.
• The urgency of service delivery sometimes overshadowed reflection and analysis.

Solutions:

• Embedded monitoring tools in all major interventions, ensuring data was collected without delaying service delivery.
• Shared templates and methodologies across municipalities to make data collection more consistent.
• Provided support to local teams to collect data in a participatory way, interpret findings and feed them back into decision-making at the local level.

By sharing tools, templates, and analysis methods through the ISSA network, Members were able to improve consistency in local monitoring and adapt quickly to emerging needs. This fostered better-informed interventions and enabled some cross-country comparison. ISSA facilitated the exchange of monitoring methodologies among members, provided technical input for designing assessment tools, and supported the inclusion of findings into advocacy at both the municipal and national levels.

What's in place? What's missing?
Crisis-response monitoring in participating municipalities benefited from practical tools like pre- and post-assessments and in-depth situation analyses, which fed directly into service improvement. However, without a unified, crisis-specific monitoring framework at the national or cross-country level, data stayed local and varied in quality, limiting the potential for broader learning and systemic change.

Being part of a regional network: Advantages of ISSA membership
The introduction of Primokiz in Romania, through collaboration between ISSA, UNICEF, and local authorities, illustrates the advantages of belonging to a regional network. ISSA brings access to tested methodologies, international expertise, and peer exchange that help adapt global models to national contexts. This collaboration turned early childhood planning from a sector, based exercise into a coordinated and participatory process, ensuring that investments are directed where children and families need them most, and where alternative service models can make the greatest impact.

Recommendations
National policymakers:
National decision-makers should view the Primokiz methodology not as a temporary solution but as a strategic tool for rethinking early childhood services. In Romania, its implementation supported by UNICEF and in partnership with local authorities offered an alternative to the classic model of expanding nurseries or kindergartens. Instead, it emphasized cross-sectoral coordination between education, health, and social protection, while engaging communities in planning. Embedding this model into national policies would make services more flexible, locally adapted, and sustainable, reducing inequalities and diversifying the offer beyond traditional infrastructure.

Local/national actors
At the local level, Primokiz has shown the power of participatory processes that bring together parents, professionals, and administrations to co-create early childhood strategies. In Romania, municipalities using the methodology identified not only shortages, such as a lack of places in nurseries, but also opportunities to better use existing resources like community centers, schools, or NGO networks. Local actors can leverage this framework to develop alternative services (play centers, parenting programs, targeted support for vulnerable families) that complement and enrich the classical provision of care.

Private donors
Private donors have a key role in enabling innovation. Their support can fund situation analyses, training for local teams, and pilot initiatives that test new service models. In Romania, flexible donor support made it possible to adapt Primokiz to very different contexts, from large cities to rural communities, generating scalable models. For donors, investing in Primokiz means investing not only in infrastructure but also in the capacity of communities to design and sustain their own solutions for children and families.

Professionals/practitioners
Teachers, health workers, and social service professionals were directly engaged in the Primokiz process through workshops, focus groups, and participatory assessments. Their involvement improved understanding of each sector’s role and led to practical joint solutions. For practitioners, Primokiz provides an opportunity to make their voices heard in local planning, to work in interdisciplinary teams, and to align interventions more closely with children’s and families’ real needs. This makes services more relevant, responsive, and anchored in everyday realities.

‘"Through the Primokiz process, we discovered that our community already had valuable resources, like cultural centers, that could be adapted to support young children. It changed how we think about planning services."
Mayor (Romania)

"For the first time, someone asked us directly what we needed for our children. I felt part of the solution, not just a beneficiary."
Parent (Romania)

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