The Evaluation Unit is involved with a small number of Southern research organizations to help build their internal capacity for monitoring and evaluation. Organizations need internal evaluation capacity in order to be able to devise, participate in, or utilize evaluations effectively. It is also an important element of organizational management. The organizations are all established IDRC partners and have worked with the Centre's programming units in the past. Our efforts in this area are based on our commitment to participatory evaluation approaches and our belief that evaluation should be an asset for those being evaluated as well as for the donor organization.

Contribution to Women's Health and Empowerment in India (BAIF) This 5-year CIDA and EcoHealth funded project will allow BAIF to implement a health and empowerment program for women and girls in 10 selected project areas in six states in India. Specific aims are to further the development of a network of government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), private organizations and other institutions working for women's health and empowerment; establish an integrated program for women's health and empowerment; improve the management of primary health and reproductive health at the local level; increase the gender responsiveness of society, institutions and families in the project areas; further the establishment of a sustainable, gender-responsive system of improved health delivery for rural women and girls; reduce the drudgery involved in the daily workload of women and girls; improve women's access to and control of physical, natural and financial resources; make institutions and communities more responsive to the needs and rights of women and girls, especially on issues relating to employment and violence; and study the structure and function of the ecosystem in the areas in which the project takes place.

There is a large monitoring and evaluation capacity building component to this project. The project team is responsible for developing and maintaining a M&E system that will provide credible data to meet accountability requirements and fulfill the project`s learning needs. The major purpose for M&E in the project is to learn about how to plan and implement project activities better. In order to be participatory and learning oriented, M&E activities may be conducted by, or include, actors from the various levels of the project: managers (CPCT), M&E implementors (2 dedicated staff members in BAIF Pune), project implementors (project teams from 9 partner NGOs); or, community members. For more information on BAIF visit its web site.

Evaluating Capacity Development in Research & Development Organizations

Capacity development has moved centre stage on the agendas of development organizations. As technologies and institutions are quickly changing and budgets for overseas development assistance are declining, strengthening the capabilities of individuals, organizations, and institutions is essential to ensure the sustainability of development efforts and the alleviation of poverty. To this end, the Evaluating Capacity Development Project (ECD), web site, is seeking to improve organizational capacity development efforts through the use of evaluation.

In cooperation with 13 organizations the ECD Project will carry out 6 six case studies. They will each test approaches to the evaluation of organizational capacity development. An e-mail discussion group has been initiated, and technical support has been provided to the evaluation teams in the field. A review and synthesis workshop in July 2001 will reflect on what has been done, identify necessary improvements in future capacity development efforts, and create a sourcebook presenting the conceptual framework, a menu of methods and tools, and examples of good practice.

Fondation Rurale de L’Afrique de l’Ouest (FRAO) / West African Rural Foundation (WARF), Senegal

IDRC has been working with FRAO in the sub-region of West Africa since 1989. The Evaluation Unit has developed a project to work with FRAO for three years starting in 2000. FRAO, an intermediary African organization, supports a strategy of organizational capacity building based on participatory approaches, that is targeted towards local organizations to address and solve the problems confronting their communities.

Developing a corporate reporting and learning system is an important element of organizational effectiveness and this project will help FRAO strengthen its organizational capacity in this area. Through this project FRAO will test and adapt Outcome Mapping to make it relevant to a regional research organization. FRAO will use Outcome Mapping internally and will train its partners and perhaps others in the region in the methodology. FRAO staff will also develop capacities in organizational assessment and other outcome-focussed evaluation methods.

Performance Management in the African Highlands Initiative (AHI), Kenya

This project will integrate performance management into the African Highlands Initiative (AHI) through monitoring and evaluation . AHI seeks to develop and implement an integrated research and development programme on natural resource management (NRM) in East African Highlands. Phase II of the African Highlands Initiative (AHI) has multi-donor support and is implemented by a coalition of national and international research and development agency partners. IDRC provided pioneering support for developing the concepts and partnerships that constitute the AHI today. The AHI goal is to improve the nutritional security and income of agricultural communities through maintenance of a sustainable natural resource base in the intensively cultivated highlands in Eastern Africa. The purpose is to improve agricultural productivity in a sustainable manner through inter-institutional efforts in research and development on critical NRM issues.

This M&E project complements other Centre support, particularly by People Land and Water (PLaW) Program Initiative, in helping to build the capacity for M&E in AHI and thereby strengthening its strategic management and performance. Systems approaches in research on natural resource management, such as pursued by AHI, are highly complex and interactive. The researchers, the communities, and other stakeholders involved tend to be focussed on doing the work and making things happen. A process and system of M&E establishes space beyond the technical research aspects for reflection, learning, adjustment, and documentation of how it is done, what changes, what works or does not work, and what makes things fail or succeed.

Nagaland Environmental Protection and Economic Development Project (NEPED), India

The Nagaland Environmental Protection and Economic Development Project (NEPED) is a CIDA funded project being coordinated by IDRC’s South Asian Regional Office and is being implemented by the Government of Nagaland. The objective of the project is sustainable management of the natural resource base of the State of Nagaland for the benefit of the people of Nagaland.

In a workshop in Kohima in October 1999, NEPED applied Outcome Mapping in a self-assessment of the project. Outcome Mapping was employed to capture the changes in behaviours which NEPED has helped support to meet its objectives.

The self-assessment did not mean to replace an external review of the project. Rather it captured, from the perspective of the project team, the most important and salient events (both positive and negative) in the accomplishments of the project, and to understand the factors which have contributed to success. Outcome Mapping offered a learning oriented approach and the intent was that the findings would help the team define their activities for the remainder of the project as well as learn from their experiences. For more information on the NEPED project see the IDRC web site.

African Evaluation Conference

Building capacity for monitoring and evaluation (M&E) in Africa, Latin America, and Asia is a part of the Evaluation Unit's programming strategy. In recent years, professional evaluation associations have started to form in several African countries with the Kenyan Evaluation Association as one of the first, the largest, and the most active. With the momentum and interest in establishing such associations in many parts of the African continent, the Kenyan Association has taken the lead in forming a Pan-African Evaluation Association. Inaugural meetings combined with a conference where panel and paper presentations as well as evaluation training sessions were held in Nairobi, 13-17 September 1999 hosted by UNICEF-ESARO. The Evaluation Unit supported some operational costs for the conference and the participation of selected evaluation practitioners and IDRC partners. The Evaluation Unit supported some operational costs for the conference and the participation of seleted evaluation practitioners and IDRC partners.

For information on upcoming African Evaluation Association events go to the Cross-Cultural Evaluation Topical Interest Group of the American Evaluation Association.

Fundación Acceso (Costa Rica)

Fundación Acceso, an NGO working in Central America, Universalia Management Group, and IDRC’s program initiative PAN and the Evaluation Unit will design an Internet service to make tools for self-assessment available to Southern civil society organizations and will research substantive issues related to self-assessment and the use of Internet tools for creating organisational capacities. It is believed that an Internet-based service for organizational self-reflection will be relevant and fill a need in the region if it can demonstrate its usefulness to organizations, is presented in a user-friendly format, and is designed to nourish non-virtual activities. This project will build on IDRC and Universalia’s work on the organisation self- assessment model.

Organizations worldwide are experiencing increased pressure to become accountable to various stakeholders on how they are using their resources to reach their goals and objectives. Donor agencies, governments, and target populations are increasing their demands in terms of the results being achieved, standards for organisational performance, and the extent to which resources are allocated in a strategic way. As a result, both Northern and Southern organizations are more reflective about how well they are doing, and the need for adequate tools to support that reflection is stronger.

For more information on Acceso visit their web site.

Promoting Peace and Food Security by Strengthening Biodiversity-based Livelihoods (SANFEC)

Social instability in South Asia is caused in part by food insecurity in rural communities leading to migration from rural to urban areas. Food insecurity in turn can be traced to the breakdown of biodiversity-based production systems such as mixed cropping, inter-cropping and crop rotation practices that provide diverse and seasonal food sources in difficult environments. This project seeks to improve food security and social stability by enhancing the capacity of communities to generate knowledge on biodiversity-based production systems and influence food policy. It builds on a research process initiated by the IDRC Using Agricultural Diversity Research Award Program and the policy advocacy work of non-governmental organizations in the South Asia Network for Food, Ecology and Culture. The two networks involve development workers, policy activists and scientists in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. The general approach of the project is to link policy advocacy, community capacity building and science through targeted training, strategic research, information sharing and participatory communication and dissemination.

In pursuit of these outcomes, a monitoring and evaluation system using the methodology of outcome mapping will be developed and used within the project. Focussed specifically on the Agricultural Diversity Research Award Program, this methodology will contribute to both learning-oriented activities as well as in the assessment of the influence of the policy dialogue generated by the project. All M&E activities will be coordinated and undertaken by project staff from each of the five countries involved in the project and will contribute directly to an interactive "collective learning process" shared by all those involved.

 "Outcome Mapping Workshops for Honduran Development"

A priority objective of the IDRC Honduras Learning Systems Program is to enhance the capacity of partners to analyze, monitor, evaluate, and learn from the development processes they are involved in. In the case of Honduras, monitoring and evaluation has proven to be an effective entry point for encouraging such learning. Currently in Honduras, evaluation is carried out through the use of a limited number of traditional evaluation methods, and is largely motivated by the need for reporting rather than learning. There is a need to introduce more flexible and participatory tools for evaluation, motivated by objectives of learning as well as assessment. A key hypothesis of the IDRC Honduras Learning Systems program is that the introduction and facilitation of a learning approach to monitoring and evaluation can serve as a key mechanism for promoting learning, as well as the generation and sharing of knowledge, drawn from past development experiences to inform future development practice.

As a key tool for promoting a learning approach to monitoring and evaluation, the Honduras program is encouraging partners to learn about and apply (as appropriate) the Outcome Mapping participatory M&E methodology developed by the IDRC Evaluation Unit. The methodology focuses on identifying and assessing progress towards influencing desired behaviour change among key actors. The methodology explicitly focuses on outcomes rather than outputs, expressed as desired changes in the behaviour of selected actors. Ideally, the methodology is undertaken through a highly participatory process, through which both the desired behaviour change, and realistic ‘progress markers’ to indicate this change, are identified in collaboration with those actors whose behaviour the partner seeks to influence.

This project will fund a series of Outcome Mapping workshops for government and non-government actors. Participants of the workshops will be provided with close follow-up assistance, to encourage the application of this methodology to participant’s projects. To date, workshops have been carried out by and for the National Association for the Promotion of Ecological Agriculture (ANAFAE), the Committee for the Protection and Sustainable Development of the Flora and Fauna of the Golf of Fonseca (Coddeffagolf), and by Zamorano University.

For more information see the IDRC Honduras Learning Systems web site http://www.idrc.ca/minga click on 'Honduras'; OR 2000-2005 strategy.

Gender Mainstreaming in SUB

The Sustainable Use of Biodiversity Program Initiative (SUB PI) has recognized the importance of gender issues in biodiversity research and made a commitment to mainstreaming gender in its programs and projects and to monitoring and evaluating progress in this direction. The primary purpose of the M&E is to put in place a systematic process for team learning and reflection, to create a ‘learning space’ in which we can openly engage in a dialogue on the ‘how’ of gender mainstreaming: what works, what doesn’t, and how these finding impact SUB’s work. For more information visit SUB's web site.

Fondation Rurale de L’Afrique de l’Ouest (FRAO) / West Africa Rural Foundation (WARF), Senegal

FRAO, an intermediary African organization, supports a strategy of organizational capacity building based on participatory approaches, that is targeted towards local organizations to address and solve the problems confronting their communities. IDRC has been working with FRAO in the sub-region of West Africa since 1989. The Evaluation Unit has developed a project to work with FRAO for three years starting in April 2000.

Developing a corporate reporting and learning system is an important element of organizational effectiveness and this project will help FRAO strengthen its organizational capacity in this area. Through this project FRAO will test and adapt Outcome Mapping to make it relevant to a regional research organization. FRAO will use Outcome Mapping internally and will train its partners and perhaps others in the region in the methodology. FRAO staff will also develop capacities in organizational assessment and other outcome-focussed participatory evaluation methods.

Nagaland Environmental Protection and Economic Development Project (NEPED), India

The Nagaland Environmental Protection and Economic Development Project (NEPED) is a CIDA funded project being coordinated by IDRC’s South Asian Regional Office and is being implemented by the Government of Nagaland. The objective of the project is sustainable management of the natural resource base of the State of Nagaland for the benefit of the people of Nagaland.

In a workshop in Kohima in October 1999, NEPED applied Outcome Mapping in a self-assessment of the project. Outcome Mapping was employed to capture the changes in behaviours which NEPED has helped support to meet its objectives.

The self-assessment did not mean to replace an external review of the project. Rather it captured, from the perspective of the project team, the most important and salient events (both positive and negative) in the accomplishments of the project, and to understand the factors which have contributed to success. Outcome Mapping offered a learning oriented approach and the intent was that the findings would help the team define their activities for the remainder of the project as well as learn from their experiences. For more information on the NEPED project see the IDRC web site.

International Model Forestry Network Secretariat (IMFNS)

IMFNS used Outcome Mapping to redefine its work in outcome terms.The information on the vision, mission, boundary partners, outcome challenges, and progress markers of the Secretariat was used to guide an ex-post evaluation in 2000. For more information on IMFNS, visit their web site.

Consortium for Sustainable Andean Development (CONDESAN), Peru

The Promotion of Andean Crops: Development of Agroindustries and Markets for Arracacha Project is supported by the Minga Program Initiative. It is aimed at increasing the value of Arracacha, an Andean root (used as a substitute for potatoes) and producers income by improving the competitiveness of traditional agro-industries and to encourage ways of protecting the environment. The Evaluation Unit is working with the team of this participatory research project to test and adapt Outcome Mapping for use at the project level. It is believed that the work of testing and modifying Outcome Mapping will contribute to a more realistic and useful planning, monitoring, and evaluation process and be of use to a wide range of development related programs and agencies. For more information on the project see the Minga web site.

Gender Mainstreaming in SUB

The Sustainable Use of Biodiversity Program Initiative (SUB PI) has recognized the importance of gender issues in biodiversity research and made a commitment to mainstreaming gender in its programs and projects and to monitoring and evaluating progress in this direction. The primary purpose of the M&E is to put in place a systematic process for team learning and reflection, to create a ‘learning space’ in which we can openly engage in a dialogue on the ‘how’ of gender mainstreaming: what works, what doesn’t, and how these finding impact SUB’s work. For more information visit SUB's web site.

Fondation Rurale de L’Afrique de l’Ouest (FRAO) / West Africa Rural Foundation (WARF), Senegal

FRAO, an intermediary African organization, supports a strategy of organizational capacity building based on participatory approaches, that is targeted towards local organizations to address and solve the problems confronting their communities. IDRC has been working with FRAO in the sub-region of West Africa since 1989. The Evaluation Unit has developed a project to work with FRAO for three years starting in April 2000. Developing a corporate reporting and learning system is an important element of organizational effectiveness and this project will help FRAO strengthen its organizational capacity in this area. Through this project FRAO will test and adapt Outcome Mapping to make it relevant to a regional research organization. FRAO will use Outcome Mapping internally and will train its partners and perhaps others in the region in the methodology. FRAO staff will also develop capacities in organizational assessment and other outcome-focussed participatory evaluation methods.

Nagaland Environmental Protection and Economic Development Project (NEPED), India

The Nagaland Environmental Protection and Economic Development Project (NEPED) is a CIDA funded project being coordinated by IDRC’s South Asian Regional Office and is being implemented by the Government of Nagaland. The objective of the project is sustainable management of the natural resource base of the State of Nagaland for the benefit of the people of Nagaland. In a workshop in Kohima in October 1999, NEPED applied Outcome Mapping in a self-assessment of the project. Outcome Mapping was employed to capture the changes in behaviours which NEPED has helped support to meet its objectives. The self-assessment did not mean to replace an external review of the project. Rather it captured, from the perspective of the project team, the most important and salient events (both positive and negative) in the accomplishments of the project, and to understand the factors which have contributed to success. Outcome Mapping offered a learning oriented approach and the intent was that the findings would help the team define their activities for the remainder of the project as well as learn from their experiences. For more information on the NEPED project see the IDRC web site.

International Model Forestry Network Secretariat (IMFNS)

IMFNS used Outcome Mapping to redefine its work in outcome terms.The information on the vision, mission, boundary partners, outcome challenges, and progress markers of the Secretariat was used to guide an ex-post evaluation in 2000. For more information on IMFNS, visit their web site.

Consortium for Sustainable Andean Development (CONDESAN), Peru

The Promotion of Andean Crops: Development of Agroindustries and Markets for Arracacha Project is supported by the Minga Program Initiative. It is aimed at increasing the value of Arracacha, an Andean root (used as a substitute for potatoes) and producers income by improving the competitiveness of traditional agro-industries and to encourage ways of protecting the environment. The Evaluation Unit is working with the team of this participatory research project to test and adapt Outcome Mapping for use at the project level. It is believed that the work of testing and modifying Outcome Mapping will contribute to a more realistic and useful planning, monitoring, and evaluation process and be of use to a wide range of development related programs and agencies. For more information on the project see the Minga web site.

Managing Natural Resources in Ecuador

 “Collaborative Management of Natural Resources in Andean Watersheds”

The Managing Natural Resources in Latin America and the Caribbean (Minga) Program Initiative has been supporting participatory management of natural resources in Ecuador for several years.  This project, “Collaborative Management of Natural Resources in Andean Watersheds” focuses on the analysis and participatory management of the El Angel River Watershed in Carchi Province, in northern Ecuador.  The main objective for this project is to promote participative and equitable management of Andean watersheds through multiscale research and multistakeholder social learning.  The project has been using the Outcome Mapping methodology for developing the project proposal and monitoring activities.  A first draft of the proposal was developed in a 3 1/2 day workshop with the participation of research team members, stakeholders and research partners (workshop report available).  The final project uses OM for planning activities and uses the monitoring journals as learning tools for the project team. (project document available)