Participatory Monitoring and Learning - Janet Geddes

After my 6-month SAI placement with Action for Social Advancement (ASA) came to an end, I was fortunate enough to be offered consultancy work by the NGO, on a World Bank-funded initiative to implement Participatory Monitoring and Learning systems within 3 rural poverty reduction projects.

What is participation?

"Participation" is very much a sexy term within development circles, and it generally refers to the involvement of the various stakeholders of a project (eg. different local community members, local and district government officials, project implementing agency staff and even donor agency staff) in key decisions regarding the planning and implementation of a project.

While this may seem like common sense, until recently participation of many of the stakeholders - most notably the local communities who are usually the primary beneficiaries of poverty-reduction projects - was not common. Many of the project-related decisions were being made by the project implementing agency (PIA) on behalf of other stakeholders, with little consultation.

Today this is changing and many development projects pride themselves on being "internally-driven" (or participatory) rather than "externally-driven" (with decisions being made by the PIA). However, there remains one area within projects which is largely non-participatory - that of project monitoring and evaluation.

Participatory Monitoring and Learning (PM&L)

Monitoring and evaluation is necessary to confirm what impact a project has made. Traditionally it is an external agency who monitors and evaluates, producing a report at the end of the project's life to satisfy the needs of the funding agency. The reports tend to be very quantitative, giving cold statistics on a project's impact and outputs, eg. x savings and credit groups have been established with average savings of x Rupees; or x wells and dams have been built benefiting x households. Whilst such information tells us in a snapshot what a project has done in terms of quantity, we end up knowing little or nothing about the quality of project interventions or what processes were gone through in order to achieve these outputs. But this is vital information to know in order to try and ensure the sustainability of these project outputs and to assist in the design of future projects. Otherwise future projects may end up making the same mistakes as previous ones.

Therefore current thinking amongst some of the donor community is that it is no longer acceptable to have monitoring and evaluation done only in this manner. Rather the project stakeholders, and particularly the local communities, must be involved in monitoring the progress of projects which are concerned with changing their own lives. Again common sense you would think! By making monitoring participatory, not only can it help the donor agencies in their quest for projects which are accountable, transparent and most importantly sustainable, but on the ground, it should make projects more responsive to the needs and wants of those communities the projects are trying to help.

By monitoring throughout a project's life rather than only mid-way and at the end, the local communities themselves can learn what is going on, what is going right and wrong, and why. Many think participatory monitoring and learning will also be a tool for capacity-building of local communities: helping them to help themselves. In simple terms, if a community is made to realise what difference a project is making or can make to their lives, then this can only be beneficial to the development of their community.

World Bank PM&L initiative

ASA was therefore requested by the World Bank to establish Participatory Monitoring and Learning systems within 3 World Bank poverty-reduction projects currently running in the state of Madhya Pradesh (MP) in India. These 3 projects are: MP Rural Women's Development and Empowerment Project, MP District Poverty Initiatives Project and MP Forestry Project. All 3 are sizable projects running to millions of US dollars each. The PM&L initiative is for 2 years and I was involved largely in its first phase.

In a nutshell, what the initiative is doing is getting the local communities and other stakeholders of these projects to meet and review the progress of the project on a regular basis, to discuss what is working and not working, what is good and bad, what can be changed or improved. For example, in one of the 3 projects, during a meeting we discovered that a goat rearing project in one village was in trouble: goats were dying, no help was being given from the project agency and none of the villagers had previous knowledge of goat rearing to start with. The villagers had been encouraged to take up goat rearing by the project agency. Feedback from these reviews will then be passed on to PIA staff, so that either changes can be made to project policies and strategies or examples of good or best practice can be more widely disseminated.

Progress of the initiative

To date it has been hard but rewarding work! Although this is only a pilot initiative, much time has had to be spent convincing the 3 Project Implementing Agencies that PM&L would be beneficial for them as well as the other project stakeholders. This is not easy particularly since 2 of the PIAs are government-run, full of the usual Indian bureaucracy and rigidity.

Three districts of Madhya Pradesh have been chosen to conduct the PM&L experiments, and within them a handful of study villages. Various new groups or committees have been established to ensure that the monitoring takes place, and the necessary action follows. Committees have had to be established at the community level, district level, and HQ level of the project agency.

My most recent task was to put together a handbook of M&L tools to use with the local communities, to get them to talk about project progress. These are based on Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) tools and include activities such as mapping, timeline analyses, venn diagrams, matrix ranking.

What is most satisfying is seeing the difference that PM&L is making within the local communities. Already people are speaking up in meetings raising project-related issues which either they didn't want to or didn't have the chance to raise elsewhere. Many of these issues relate to the way in which the project agency staff is implementing the project. One common issue raised is why one household in a village has been included to benefit from a project, whilst another - which is similar or even worse off in socio-economic terms - has been excluded. Another issue raised was why a community group had not received the full amount of project grant it had applied for, even though the full amount had been approved.

One can see how fundamental the project issues being raised through PM&L are! ASA is therefore having to play a important mediating role to ensure that the project agency deals properly with these issues so that both the project and community can benefit. This is a tightrope to walk, considering how transparency and accountability remain hard-to-achieve outcomes in many multi-million development projects in India.