SIL Tanzania - Scripture Engagement Research and Ministry

In the Nyakyusa language area, from May to September, we met with eight groups (totaling 70-80 people) to listen to their stories. The majority of those we met with were church leaders or people with specific church responsibilities. Some were former SIL staff, some have attended literacy/Scripture engagement workshops held over the years, others had some connection to SIL through church visits made by SIL staff or through the Nyakyusa Community Based Organisations (CBOs). Sense-making meeting On Thursday 5 th October, we held one final meeting, in Kyela, gathering together representatives from the two Nyakyusa CBOs. About fifteen people came, including four from Malawi (which created an interesting language situation as some of them couldn’t understand Swahili very well, which was our primary language of communication in the meeting). It was very hot, and people struggled to stay awake after lunch! Outline of meeting Welcome and greetings (we invited the Chair of one...

Our trip included a combination of Outcome Harvesting, distribution and ministry. Here's how it went. Team Core team from the office in Mbeya: Me (Katherine) and Frank Mwaluanda. Assistants: First we were joined by David Mwangunga, to visit the mountainous region in the north of the Nyakyusa language area (a.k.a. Unyakyusa). Then in the south of Unyakyusa, which at a much lower altitude is hot and tropical, we were joined by Andrew Mwangosi. Both David and Andrew used to work with us as the literacy/SE workers for the Nyakyusa language area. Finally we went to Malawi, where Frank and Andrew were joined by Andrew Mwamatandala, who was one of the Nyakyusa translators, while I returned to Mbeya (due to the challenges of getting a visa to enter Malawi). What we did Wednesday: Travelled to our first research location in the Nyakyusa language area, the small town of Kandete. We used Wednesday evening as an opportunity to show the Nyakyusa translation of the Jesus film on the out...

On the 1 st – 2 nd June, Frank and I met with some key members of the Nyakyusa community for the purpose of our research. These were former SIL staff (two Bible translators and two literacy/SE workers), the Chair and another member of the CBO, and two members of the Malawian committee (as Nyakyusa is a cross-border language). Four of them lived close enough to return home each evening, but the others had come some distance (we had picked up two en-route) so they stayed overnight in local guest houses (we covered everyone’s travel, accommodation and food expenses). Despite planning to start at 10am, and most of us being there by then, we weren’t able to get started until over an hour and a half later as it was important to wait for the Chair of the CBO (adhering to protocol and hierarchy is essential here) and we needed to find a suitable room to meet in. The meeting was conducted primarily in Swahili, but with some Nyakyusa and English to help one of the Malawians. Here is rough ou...

Having completed the training week, it was time to take hold of the reins and prepare to continue what we had begun. At the end of the training week we had tentatively mapped out where we would go on our next field trip and how we could go about continuing to gather Outcome Statements. Before meeting with the team (Frank and Majaliwa), I listed out what we needed to talk about and spent some time thinking about ‘Progress Markers’:  what things would we expect to see, like to see and love to see happening in the community in relation to work that SIL Tanzania has done there. (Search online for ‘Outcome Mapping’ for more information about the idea of Progress Markers.) On Tuesday, 21 st March, I met with the team. We worked through the following: Contributions: During the training week we didn’t have time to list out the contributions to change seen in the Outcome Statements, so we wanted to work on that. We were able to make intelligent guesses about what had contributed to mo...

Karibuni! Welcome to our blog. I’m Katherine, the Scripture Engagement Coordinator for SIL Tanzania.  Some background Our Language Programmes Coordinator came to me with an idea: how about we do some research in communities that launched New Testaments in recent years to see what we can learn about the impact of our work and having NTs a couple of years on from the launch. This research can also provide an opportunity for staying engaged with these communities, helping with distribution and offering ministry. Outcome Harvesting may be a good way to go about it. I was tasked with coordinating this project. Within the general goal of learning about the impact of our work, we also specifically want to learn about which aspects of our work have produced the most fruit, in terms of observable changes in behaviour, and who/what were the main contributors to those changes taking place. By discussing the outcomes of the research together with relevant groups in the community, we hope tha...

On the last day we started to dive a bit deeper into the analysis of the outcomes and sense-making we started on Thursday afternoon.   Sense-making Frank mentioned the previous day that he started to feel like he could see some patterns and connections in the data, so we started off by sharing any insights we had so far. We were careful to explain that these are just initial insights, as we have only been to one village and hope to collect more data from other villages and actors. However, it is helpful to do analysis iteratively, so see what patterns are emerging in the data and might be worth exploring further, and what gaps present themselves in the data (these might be gaps, or a lack of outcomes). We continued by doing some simple categorisation by actor: Pastors (10) Community people (13) - of which 5 were about elderly, and 4 about women NGO (5) Choir leaders (3) Churches (3) (church members acting together) Sunday school teachers (1) literacy teachers (1) Pre-scho...

In the morning we debriefed from the field visit, with the team reviewing what they had heard and potential outcomes. The team had taken good notes, and Phil had already started to write some draft outcomes in Google Sheets. We reviewed what we had collected and filled in details about locations and times as best we could, and removed a few which we deemed to be too vague. We also reviewed some additional draft outcomes that had come from background reading, and from the discussions from the first two days. By the end of the morning we had 37 draft outcomes which were written up into a ‘database’ on Google Sheets. Many of these were small behavioural changes, but this is considered very good for just staff recollection and one visit to a village. These were just the descriptions,  no contribution or significance was written at this stage. We printed these out and in the afternoon reviewed the significance of the outcomes. The team had expressed some uncertainty about what significa...

We left Mbeya at around 8am and travelled 1.5 hours out to the village of Jojo, where Mwangwale is a pastor. We met with a group of 8 people including pastors, literacy teachers, and other small group leaders. Katherine started by leading a short bible study on being connected to the vine and bearing fruit - which linked nicely to the rest of our work. Aside from being a good bible study, the study helped to warm up the group, built trust and unity, and encouraged participation as the group reflected on questions about the passage. We then explained our other purpose for being here - to see what fruit the SE work had been producing.   The team gave a few examples of stories of change and then invited the rest of the group to share with us. We heard many stories, and the team took notes, marking where we had heard potential outcomes. We asked for clarity about dates and places, and what had contributed to the changes where this was not clear. Most of the changes described were...

On Tuesday we started to work with some tools to review what has happened, build a systems perspective, and start surface potential outcomes. Timeline Our first exercise was to conduct a timeline of the SE work since the NT was launched in 2020. Pink notes were used for contextual issues which had affected the project (e.g. Covid!), orange notes were used for SE activities, yellow notes for NGO activities/developments, and green notes for fruit/effects of the SE work. This gave us an overall sense of the SE work that has happened over the last few years, and the general changes that the team had observed.  Actor Map We reviewed the timeline to see what actors were mentioned. We then added other actors which we felt played a role in making SE happen. We had a short time left before lunch, so we split into pairs and briefly reflected on what roles we felt these actors should be playing.  Drafting outcomes In the afternoon we introduced the idea of writing outcome statements. The...