Who is Samah Hassan?

In less than one year, with the support and assistance of the Egypt Civil Society Support Program (ECSS), Samah Hassan propelled herself from a part-time NGO volunteer to one of the most reliable staff members and enthusiastic trainers at the South Egypt Development Association – Qena (SEDAQ), a USAID grantee in Upper Egypt.

Samah first heard about ECSS while volunteering for the Family and Environment Development Association in Qena in late 2012. Intrigued by the ECSS e-learning portal, she enrolled in and successfully completed her first online course, Results-Based Monitoring, in January 2013. She accepted a low-level, paid position at SEDAQ in February 2013, and continued to take ECSS e-learning courses in order to gain more skills and knowledge in the field of monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Shortly after she joined SEDAQ, in March 2013, the association’s M&E specialist resigned and management assigned Samah new M&E responsibilities based on her demonstrated M&E capabilities, organizational skills, and attention to detail.

As the new M&E specialist for SEDAQ, Samah actively participated in all on-site technical assistance provided by ECSS, particularly the training on database development. She also attended ECSS workshops on strategic planning (March 2013), data analysis (April 2013), and the facilitation of the Institutional Development Framework assessment tool (June 2013). Due to her ability to learn new things quickly and her aptitude for training others, ECSS asked Samah to serve as a co-facilitator for the Database Development for M&E Purposes workshop conducted for the USAID Economic Growth grantees in August 2013. Her participation in the workshop enriched the training and she adeptly provided guidance and support to the participants based on her own learning experiences.

In addition to developing her own professional skills, Samah has also proved to be instrumental in the development of SEDAQ’s institutional capacity. In September 2013, the association made notable improvements on all three ECSS annual assessment tools. Most significantly, SEDAQ improved its M&E performance by 35 percent since March 2013. ECSS attributes this improvement to Samah’s efforts to revise project indicators, develop new data collection tools, and create a database application that allows SEDAQ to monitor project progress and achievements more effectively.