MONITORING AND EVALUATION: WHO DOES IT?

Last week I wrote about data quality and thanks to my readers that I feel encouraged to venture on an equally interesting area of responsibility for M&E. I have decided to write about this rather (seemingly) obvious aspect because when responsibilities are not clearly defined, they are left to no one hence could easily be undone. This is not going to be as long as last weeks lengthy and possibly boring piece to some people.

Who does M&E bothers me many times because whenever I go to conduct an evaluation or even baseline studies in an organisation or even venture on an organisation development process hence I need some data/information, I get referred to an M&E focal point/department. If these people are not there, nothing happens. It is like organisations, tend to lack an institutional character and take on individualised notions. This is rather absurd and should be discouraged particularly in this age of going green, better and sustainable.

My article today is about propagating a case for inclusivity in M&E where all engage in the data business of an organisation. I will begin from the point I made last week. I did observe that when it comes to collecting data and information especially for progress, activities can be tracked through simple reports compiled by those implementing them with their community resource persons and participants. This data is easily disaggregated by any factor(s) as required by donors or the organisation itself (age, sex, region, ethnicity, religion, etc). No expertise is required for this purpose. What an M&E focal point needs to do here is simply to ensure that those implementing the activity have the requisite forms/sheets for collecting these data and that they do this exercise as well as later make sense of the data by ensuring its analysis, including dissemination back to the department or section concerned.

The data on performance, as I said last week, is more complicated because it is first controversial in terms of epistemology (how we learn) and ontology (how the world exist). Some people approach these data quantitatively, while others use qualitative methodologies, but it is now accepted that we need to use mixed methods, whatever this means. I have in recent past written how to ably achieve the mixture.

There is no reason why staff in an organization cannot also participate in data gathering even where consultants are involved. In many non-profits, where the tendency is for consultants to bring research assistants and enumerators to undertake data collection, it is possible to work along project officers and/or interns during data collection for learning purposes. The learning is according to my first edition of this newsletter a fundamental purpose of M&E in the current times. We are no longer in the "policing" era of M&E where the exercise was for fault-finding. If you are looking for mistakes, you will obviously find them and so what? How will they help you? But if you want to learn, you will find out the things that are not working and recommend ways to make them work. I can bet that this last approach is much better for a growing organisation as opposed to the fault finding and policing method.

Some people have criticised me when I propose that organisation staff and interns get involved in fieldwork data collection and also learn some little data analysis for purposes of data and results' ownership and identifying with the results of the M&E. These naysayers reason that data gathering and analysis are technical and need speclaised skills, which these staff and interns may not possess. I often insist that human beings who are willing and ready to learn are trainable and can make it for the ultimate good. When I try it, I have hardly failed. I challenge you to dare try this and share with me because I believe God will keep me for more years to hear your feedback.

In the responsibility for M&E, the worst experience comes from those M&E roles being played by expatriate consultants and firms, who get jobs and then employ local researchers to do the job for obvious reasons of language, cultures and of course public relations. Much of the research and M&E in Africa even when in practice done by Africa is hardly attributed to the real workers but to those expatriates. The locals, even when they are university professors, are treated like research assistants and guides, often being relegated to tour guide roles and inconsequential service providers. The organisational workers are themselves hardly recognised. Many (all cannot be doing it badly) of these forms of M&E research may need much more improvement.

In a nutshell, the role of data gathering and analysis is not the responsibility of an M&E focal point (officer, coordinator, manager or department) but a shared role for everyone within the project or programme including the users/participants. What the focal points do is bringing everything together and ensuring that it is done well as well as M&Eing it. This shared role enhances the case for participatory process that feeds back to the project or programme itself. Mistakes could be made and this is okay because learning is best made through those mistakes.