Action plans and indicators - the road leading towards the end of the EU Food Facility in West Africa

The M&E workshop in preparation of the Final Report for the IFAD/EU Food Facility Programme in West Africa closed today.

Over the two days of the workshop, discussions and energy levels were at their best. It was a real pleasure to facilitate a workshop of this type with such a motivated group.

The day began by the participants giving feedback on the data collection tools developed the previous day. Each team was asked to review the questionnaire and personalise it to fit the needs of the country and context. The precisions brought to the document were mainly concerning some thinking about the partners and stakeholders involved in the implementation of the Food Facility. We also reviewed some semantics one again, as the questionnaire needs to be as clear as possible and a stand- alone document for someone who has not participated in the Ouagadougou workshop where the document was conceived.

The floor was then given to ICRISAT who presented their qualitative data collection questions to the rest of the group. The ICRISAT questions necessarily needed to differ from those of the country components as the institutional arrangements for the ICRISAT grant are somewhat different.

In any case, for both the country components and ICRISAT, the questions are centered around the following themes:

- Relevance of the programme and its similarities to other food security programmes

- Farmer assessment of the trainings/knowledge and support received

- Sustainability and probability of scaling up interventions/services once the project is closed

After agreeing on the questions, the participants with the guidance of the M&E Consultant, Task Manager and Head Agronomist for the EU FF, drafted an action plan including an implementation schedule going up until the discussion and endorsement of the final report to be submitted to the EU which will take place in Abidjan at the end of March 2012.

The first step in the action plan is to recruit a local consultant by component to alleviate project teams in the collection of the qualitative data set that was agreed upon for the EU FF.

At the end of the workshop, the particpats expressed their enthusiasm regarding the methodology and approach used to tackle the preparation of the final report to the EU Food Facility. All participants recognised the lack of qualitative data in many of the reports produced and appreciate the innovative approach towards producing a final report which truly incorporates impact.

As many pointed out though, it would have been very useful to have this workshop well before January 2012. The report writing team and participants are in any case motivated and ready to achieve objectives set forth during the workshop and translated into the challenging action plan.

Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation Workshop – Days 5 and 6 – Banjul, The Gambia

This article is a contribution from Mr Lamin Fatajo, Monitoring and Evaluation Officer of the Rural Finance Project in The Gambia.

Finally after 4 days of interaction with eachother the group went out to the field and visited the villages of Sukuta and Brufut in western region. Prior to the field visit, roles of each actor were defined as well as the activities to be conducted. The objective of the field visit was to define the objective of Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (PM&E) with the communities and identify the indicators they deem necessary to monitor for learning and value addition. The planning includes what will be done, how it will be done, the resources required and a timeline.
The PM&E Committees comprise of VISACA representatives, The Village Development Committee, a mentoring kafoo and 3 influential community members who were sensitized on PM&E in 2009.

After the fruitful field work, we all returned to Banjul to share the experiences gained from the field and also to determine the readiness of the trainees to conduct the step down training intended for the PM&E Committees at the village level.

The first step in the process was to explain the purpose of the visit, which includes an explanation of what PM&E is all about. Then the community defined their own objectives of the PM&E. This was centered on improving the performance of the VISACAs in both communities.

Objectives formulated with the population
- Increase advocacy for the VISACA System

- Improve linkages with other groups in the village to mobilize savings and membership

- Increase the number of savings and credit groups strengthen or formed.

The indicators to track the progress of achievement of these objectives were identified as change in membership, number of sensitization meetings conducted, change in group registration, change in the amount of deposits from groups and individual members of the groups, change in the number of groups formed/strengthen.

Some of the most valuable lessons learned during this exercise are:
- The exercise was highly participatory

- The purpose and objective of PME was well received and accepted by the communities

- The communities were able to identify their own priorities

- The PME committee can be used as an instrument for saving and membership mobilization

- There is hope that when project activities to be conducted are fully explained to the PME committees they can identify what they what from those activities and be able to monitor them

- Target setting is not fully embraced by the committee as show by only increase in the indicators without the magnitude of change expected.

- The trainees have handled the situation satisfactorily therefore, ready to conduct satisfactory PM&E training to the communities.

- Due to the dominance of the VISACA Management committees in the PME committees there is reason to believe that the purpose/objective of the PM&E was mainly for improvement of the VISACA system.

Innovations suggested by the committees during the exercise include:

- Targeting village based institutions such as schools and osusu groups (solidarity group financing)

- daily cash collection from market vendors

- operation of consumer cooperatives to fight inflation for VISACA members

On Saturday, the training workshop closed with the remarks of the acting project coordinator Mr. Sam Ali Ashcroft who thanked all the participants and WARF facilitators for a well attended workshop as well as recognizing the efforts of the WARF facilitator in ensuring that the workshop was a success. He also dilated on the useful role of the Multi-Disciplinary Facilitation Team (MDFT) members in the whole process particularly in ensuring the dentification of synergies that exist between different projects at the grass root level.

PM&E Worshop Banjul The Gambia - Day 4

While at dinner on Wednesday, we all had the pleasure of seeing ourselves on the Gambia Radio and Television Services (GRTS) evening news.

On Thursday morning, we resumed to our workshop with the presentation and analysis of the tools used in Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation, such as community scorecards, evaluation wheels, field force analysis, SWOT analysis. Each tool was explained, analysed and criticised by the participants.

The lively discussions brought us to the need for data transformation some cases and to discuss once again the difficulty of this exercise. Participants also agreed on the value added if the activity is undertaken properly and can truly improve the quality of results yielded by the projects. After a thorough analysis of the pros and cons of PM&E, the positive aspects of PM&E definitely outweigh the negative aspects. One of the most positive lessons to retain from these 4 days is that Monitoring and Evaluation is not the sole responsability of the Monitoring and Evaluation Officer,

but is the responsability of the entire project staff.

The afternoon was dedicated to setting up the field work to be done on Friday. A VISACA was to be visited and all stakeholders were to be involved in this preliminary process.

Unfortunately, I was not able to participate in the field work. I have asked my colleagues from the Rural Finance Project to write a little something regarding how the field work proceeded and the wrap up meeting held on Saturday morning. I hope to publish their contribution soon.

Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation Workshop - Day 2 - Banjul, The Gambia

The Rural Finance Project/West Africa Rural Foundation Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (PM&E) workshop continues. The second day of the workshop has been interactive and lively even though it coincides with two national holidays, President Jammeh's Birthday - to whom will all wish a Happy Birthday - and African Liberation Day.

Participants were able to identify the key stakeholders and actors of the projects in The Gambia (project staff, beneficiaries and their organisations, government - national and local - service providers and the like) and reflected on their roles, responsibilities, rights, relationships and return in terms of project implementation and objectives. These actors were then placed into a power versus interest matrix. Much interesting debate sprung from this analysis especially regarding the roles and responsibilities and the power relationships that were identified.

The facilitators underlined how important these exercises are and insisted on the value added for projects in design phase, as these matrices clearly map out institutional arrangements and linkages and are a valid tool for later implementation.

More specifically, the matrices, if analysis is undertaken correctly, identify key partners in project execution (high on both the interest and power scales) and those in most need of capacity building to protect their interests (those high on the interest scale but low on the power scale).

The theme of the day was the importance of having clear and simple objectives, indicators and criteria and being able to communicate those to all of the actors involved in PM&E.


We then broke up into groups and engaged in role playing to identify objectives, indicators and criteria for projects. It was becoming quite obvious at this stage that agreeing on clear and simple objectives is not an easy task, especially when this is activity is undertaken with a participatory approach, and this was only a simulation!

Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation Workshop

Today, the FRAO/RFP Participatory M&E workshop was inaugurated in Banjul, The Gambia.

The Rural Finance Project in The Gambia (RFP) has organised with the support of the West Africa Rural Foundation FRAO/WARF a Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (PM&E) training workshop in Banjul from 24 to 29 May 2010.

The objective of the workshop is to reinforce PM&E capacities of project teams and partners engaged in the implementation of IFAD funded projects in the Gambia in including VISACAS, service providers and government. Representatives of the IFAD Country Programme in The Gambia were present as well as representatives from the Ministry of Agriculture, the Microfinance Department of the Central Bank of The Gambia, Gambian Microfinance Associations (GAWFA, NACCUG) service providers and others.

The one week workshop has been set up in a participatory manner so that participants can share their views and learn from each other under the leadership of Mr Mohamed Kebbeh and Mr Adama Ndiaye of WARF who are facilitating the workshop.

Today, participants were able to brainstorm on Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (PM&E) starting from its definition moving towards its importance in project implementation and the advantages and improvements it will bring to projects in terms of results and impact.

The lively group agreed that PM&E is a fundamental aspect for project implementation, as PM&E is not just a regular data collection or research activity, instead it increases ownership of the project for its inclusive nature, it gives a sense of accountability of project results to the communities in which interventions are taking place and it could improve project overall activities and outcome.

In summary PM&E is a shared learning process based on effective team work, necessary because of the large number of participants, negotiation of interests and possibilities and flexibility as the acceptance of PM&E implies a shift in power relationships because all participants are equal in PM&E.

Finally, PM&E allows for overall better results and gives continuity and sustainability to projects beyond their official life span thanks to beneficiaries designing the system based on criterion they have chosen rather than imposed indicators.

The key steps to PM&E are summarised as follows: (i) deciding to set up a PM&E; (ii) identifying the stakeholders; (iii) defining expectations and objectives; (iv) selecting criteria and indicators; (v) deciding on the tools and methods; (vi) collecting and analysing data; (vii) implementing change and manging and maintaining the system.

How to adapt his model to the context of Gambian projects and managing the system once its in place will be discussed during the course of this training.