Communities Take the Lead: Participatory Monitoring
How can organizations lean in to their role as partners in development and not as sole implementers? This is a question we and many other organizations continuously ask ourselves. One crucial way in which we achieve this is by seeking the full participation of community members in every aspect of development – planning, budgeting, implementing, and monitoring.
At OneVillage Partners, we know that when communities define what success looks like to them and have the tools to measure that success, projects and interventions are more effective and more sustainable – ultimately, the projects will continue to improve people’s lives for longer than if community members were not involved.
Participatory Monitoring & Evaluation is an approach that works in partnership with community members, with the goal of evaluating success based on what the community members deem important. OneVillage Partners’ Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning strategy is highly participatory and serves two purposes: to inform our programs to make adaptations and improvements, and to train community members in monitoring and evaluation. Ultimately, this strategy results in projects being used and maintained sustainably.
Because interventions are by and for the community members, they are the main audience for the data. That’s why our Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Team presents a progress report on self-selected goals back to the community, which can then serve as the basis for an action plan when targets aren’t being met. OneVillage Partners can use the information from these progress reports to improve programs and make recommendations on similar projects being implemented in other partner communities.
So what does this look like in real life? Let’s say a community votes to prioritize education for young students because the nearest primary school is three miles away. So the volunteers trained by OneVillage Partners in the Community Action program decide to build a primary school; they plan where it should go, create a budget, and oversee the construction. How will they know the project is successful? The volunteer-leaders might decide that one indicator for success is the number of children enrolled in school, so they record the number of children going to school before the school is built and how many are enrolled in school after the new school project is completed. They will then share the results back to their community, openly informing their fellow community members about how well the new school is working for the community. This in turn gives community members motivation and excitement to enroll their kids in their new school and ensure the project is a success for years to come.
If you’d like to learn more about how program participants can lead monitoring and evaluation activities, read our case study, Participatory Monitoring: Communities Take the Lead with Picture-Based Tools and reach out to us at info@onevillagepartners.org.