Africa Yoga Project is a data driven organization, and this past year we engaged AYP teachers to collect data to monitor our impact in our outreach yoga classes. Outreach classes are free classes taught by AYP teachers in their local communities to people who otherwise wouldn't have access to wellbeing services. 

 Objectives

The three-month outreach monitoring pilot was planned and executed  in Nairobi to help us explore how best we can uniquely identify each participant who attends our community outreach classes without double counting (ie counting repeat visits as two different people). Besides unique identifies we also emphasized data segregation by gender and age ranges to better inform decisions and guide learning. We intend to use the learnings from the pilot to inform organization wide rollout of the unique identification system in 2019.

How the pilot was executed  

Seven yoga teachers (3 female, 4 male) enrolled in the 3-year employability academy were carefully selected to ensure fair representation. We also selected one of our deaf community outreach classes to ensure inclusivity. The pilot kicked off with one half day induction training for the teachers followed by fortnight meetings to review progress, challenges and share best practices. Each teacher selected one outreach from his/her pool of classes to pilot during the first month and roll-out to all his/her outreaches in the second and third months. The data collected was input into a google sheet analysed and the findings disseminated to the team.

Findings

A total of  262 (39% female, 61% male) people were reached from 165 sessions taught. The details are summarised in the table below by gender and age categories:    

Table 1.1: Number of people reached by age categories and gender

21% of the people reached were first time attendees while 6% reported that they were also attending other AYP outreaches elsewhere as well. 74% of the students had attended at least half of the sessions conducted during the outreach monitoring period. 

Thank you for reading and supporting Africa Yoga Project. We welcome questions in comments below or sent directly to info@africayogaproject.org