How communities can be involved in monitoring and evaluating development projects

Monitoring and evaluating development projects is a task often left to donor agencies and experts. But what would happen if local communities are actively engaged in the process? How can resources be harnessed at a local level for improved results? Devex talked with project managers and experts in the field who gave the following four suggestions. 1. Build community capacity When Laura Hughston, head of program quality and impact at Farm Africa, was at Plan International, she decided to try something new: Hand over control of an evaluation process entirely to children who were beneficiaries of the program. “What was [crucial] to me was that we would train children who were beneficiaries of the project,” Hughston told Devex in an interview. “I didn’t want to have children selected based on their academic talent or background,” she added. So children from underserved communities, some of whom were orphans or school dropouts, were chosen to form the M&E team. “Some had disabilities or other additional challenges,” Hughston said. This strategy was used to monitor projects implemented in three countries — Cambodia, Zimbabwe and Kenya. “In every stage, the children did return a very nuanced assessment that gave us insight on how we can implement projects and include more voices and make sure that what we do addresses everyone’s needs,” Hughston said. Advocates of strategies like Hughston’s believe that overhauling an organization’s monitoring and evaluation processes to engage local communities not only increases transparency, but also empowers community members to make a compelling case for the policies they want. It also benefits those who become part of the process. By building the capacity of a group of young people to collect data from a range of voices with different backgrounds, go through the rigorous process of analyzing the data, and present a compelling case, Hughston considered the experience as a successful development outcome for the children. “Should they choose in future to use that to advocate for their rights and put forward a compelling case for what they need, they have the skills to do that themselves,” she said. Hughston applies the same participatory monitoring in her current role as head of monitoring and evaluation at Farm Africa, a nonprofit that provide technical support for farmers in East Africa. “The feedback from the community helps us understand the consequences of our projects, how we are doing it and how we can do it better,” she said. It is more about getting a plurality of voices rather than getting one or two people to say, “this is working for me,” Hughston believes. 2. Make beneficiaries the center of programming from the beginning Communities should be empowered to not only evaluate but also to monitor projects right from their implementation, said Diana Nsubuga, the Uganda country manager for the Global Health Corps. “The NGOs should just come in to support with either the technical skills or tools. But the community should be a major stakeholder in measuring impact and monitoring evaluation,” she said. For example, Global Health Corps gathers feedback about the impact of its fellowship from the fellows who participate in the program, instead of relying on only the evaluation provided by the host organizations where these fellows work. This way, the fellows remain at the center of the programming. “Those we call beneficiaries should be allowed to decide what success should look like and the metrics to assess it,” said Hughston. “Local people's metrics of success should count, not just the metrics of donors and agencies.” 3. It does not replace traditional M&E World Neighbors, an international nonprofit working with underserved communities to improve livelihoods, is another example of an NGO that engages communities in the assessment and evaluation of projects. Their long-term approach to project implementation requires them to stay between eight and 10 years in the communities where they work. This allows the project managers to collaborate with the beneficiaries to implement a five-stage development model of project initiation, growth, expansion, consolidation and maturity. “We are not a one sector development organization,” said Kate Schecter, World Neighbor’s CEO. “That is why it takes us a decade to go through all these different stages and to address all of the various needs of the community.” World Neighbors will not go into a community with the intention of helping provide a solution to a problem without first assessing the situation, Schecter said. She explained that the team moved from using a needs-based assessment to asset-based assessment approach in addressing community issues. This means that instead of looking at what the community doesn’t have, World Neighbors project managers look at what the community has and work with them to figure out how they can lift themselves out of poverty by enhancing the work. “When we do the asset-based evaluation, the community is involved at every stage,” Schecter said. However, this does not take the place of the traditional mechanism used for monitoring and evaluation, or the metrics required by donors. World Neighbors still sends quarterly reports to field offices. “We have meetings every year to develop work plans with our partners,” said Schecter. The expanded evaluation helps identify trouble spots and ways to overcome them. “We also have external evaluation going on either because a grant requires it or we want to make sure that we are on track,” she said. 4. Continuing community ownership is key Although some nongovernmental organizations already engage communities in monitoring and evaluation, many still underestimate the value of such engagement. As a result, when the project ends, the community is not able to take ownership to ensure sustainability. A simplified process that does not need complicated technical know-how can be created for these communities to continue to assess and monitor projects even after an NGO’s exit. Takah Kapikinyu — an M&E technical manager for an international nonprofit organization based in Virginia — gave an example of how he has seen this approach work. The process of monitoring and evaluation could involve recruiting members of the communities to form a committee that helps gather data during a project, he said. By engaging the community members in the process of data collection, they gain a better understanding of why they need to collect the data and why the data is important. They also learn to use the data to lobby the local government legislature to address the issues identified during the process of gathering the information. “If you have a basic system that allows the people to collect data, analyze data at the community level and use these data, I think it is important,” Kapikinyu said. He did, however, point out the need for emphasis to be placed on outcomes of a project and not outputs because output focuses on the number of people changed but the outcome is what change has been achieved. "Local communities are often consulted on projects but rarely are they asked to evaluate the results," Hughston said. Focusing on the outcomes will improve the way that development community share information with the community. “In order for the community to be fully engaged and for communities to support our efforts in M&E, we need to address that feedback loop,” Kapikinyu said. NGOs should also come back to the community and interpret the outcome at the community level,” he said. Devex delivers cutting-edge insights and analysis to the leaders shaping and innovating the business of development. Make sure you don't miss out. Become a Devex Executive Member today.