MONITORING AND EVALUATION OF SOCIAL PROJECTS AND PROGRAMS AS A PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE OF A SOCIAL WORKER IN WARTIME

The article substantiates the relevance of monitoring and evaluation of social programs as a component of the professional competence of a social worker in wartime. The full-scale war in Ukraine has both increased the need for evidence regarding the relevance, effectiveness and impact of social and humanitarian programs and made it much harder to obtain. The main challenges of conducting monitoring and evaluation in the wartime context are characterized: the high mobility of recipients of social services, restricted access to certain territories and population groups, the loss or rapid obsolescence of administrative data, the difficulty of conducting repeated measurements, the security and ethical risks of data collection, and the instability of the external conditions of program implementation. Particular attention is paid to the methodological complexity of evaluating the impact of social programs amid a multiplicity of social and humanitarian interventions and the influence of a considerable number of external factors. The authors argue that outcomes should be distinguished from impact, and attribution from the contribution of a social program to the changes achieved. The authors propose their own definition of the M&E competence of a social worker as an integrated ability to methodologically substantiate, plan and conduct monitoring and evaluation of social programs, to work critically with data and to use the evidence obtained for professional and managerial decision-making. Within the structure of this competence, analyticalmethodological, research-instrumental, evaluative-interpretive, managerial, ethical and context-adaptive components are distinguished. The experience of developing the M&E competence of students at the second (master’s) level of higher education within the educational and professional program “Monitoring and Evaluation of Social Programs” at Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University is described. The prospects for developing this professional competence in order to ensure the evidence base of social work and the quality of social services during the war and the post-war recovery of Ukraine are determined.