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Zeynep Shorter, PhD, Health Services, University of Washington, 1525 NW 57th St. Unit 421, Seattle, WA 98107, 206-783-1443, zeynepa@u.washington.edu

The paper discusses the overseas experience of a public health student who worked for a local NGO to improve its long-term capacity for monitoring and evaluation, and developed evaluation plans for reproductive health education and safe-motherhood programs.

The Reproductive Health Education Program is situated in the newly-established Women Health Centers (WHCs) of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. They are located in five low-income districts in Istanbul: Küçükçekmece, Eminönü and Eyüp on the European Side, and Ümraniye and Pendik on the Anatolian side.

The second program is the Safe Motherhood Program at the Ministry of Health's Bak?rköy Hospital. The hospital is one of the major tertiary centers for deliveries on the European side of Istanbul. Every day, 60 normal deliveries and 20 C-sections occur in the hospital, and approximately 160 pregnant women receive prenatal care.

For both programs, the student introduced logic models as a technique to define the input, output and outcome objectives and clarify the connection between activities and achievements.

The project became a vehicle to apply participatory evaluation techniques in which stakeholders and implementers of the program actively participate and use the results for program improvement. As a result, the teams of the programs gained skills and knowledge to use the monitoring and evaluation frameworks constructed together and to follow through the steps of evaluation activities. In return, the student learned how to be humble, sensitive and listening in a different culture.

Learning Objectives: