Determine the indicator's value by using the following methodology:
1) Define who can be considered as ‘project staff’ for the purpose of this indicator. This should be primarily people who come in touch with the target population, such as field workers, project and programme managers and MEAL staff (it can also include the staff of partner organizations).
2) Define a limited number of the most important knowledge that the project staff should have. When doing so, 1) review the Protection Cluster’s “Blue Training Module” and the pre- / post-test provided in the Protection Mainstreaming Training Package (see below); and 2) consider the key protection mainstreaming measures taken by your organization.
3) Prepare a simple test assessing whether the project staff have the pre-defined, most important knowledge. The test can use a combination of:
- questions assessing people’s knowledge related to essential protection mainstreaming principles, procedures, measures, etc.
- scenarios where the person is asked to describe how s/he would respond to a given situation (i.e. there are no predefined answers)
- questions asking people to choose between two or more statements (one being correct, one or more being wrong)
- questions assessing the extent to which people believe common misconceptions related to mainstreaming protection
The pre- / post-test included in the Protection Mainstreaming Training Package (see below) can help you design such a test; however, adapt it to your context and the measures your organization uses. Ensure that you also include open-ended questions, as – compared to questions with single / multiple choice answers – they allow you to get a much better understanding of people’s knowledge. If you do not specialize in protection mainstreaming, engage a relevant expert in preparing and evaluating the test.
To avoid having unrealistically high or unnecessarily low requirements, verify the difficulty of the test by pre-testing it with several people.
4) Decide how many marks will be allocated to each correct answer. For example, for a correct answer to an easier question you can give one mark while for correct answers to more difficult questions / scenarios you can give two marks.
5) Decide how many marks a person needs to get to be considered as being “aware of the key principles and practices of protection mainstreaming” (e.g. a score of at least 15 out of 20).
6) Administer the test. If you need to compare a member of staff’s awareness before and after a certain learning event (e.g. a training), you might need to design two comparable tests, so that you can administer a pre- and post-test.
7) Count the number of staff who achieved the minimum acceptable score (see point 5).
8) To calculate the indicator’s value, divide the number of staff who achieved the minimum acceptable score by the total number of staff who completed the test. Multiply the result by 100 to convert it to a percentage.