Managing for Impact: Talking about MandE

Further to Thevan’s post on Impact evaluations; here’s an excerpt from a very interesting article on “Evaluation Evolution” posted in the Broker magazine the other day (link to full article below); Three approaches to evaluation Evaluation evolution? Politicians are calling for evaluations that measure the effects of development cooperation. However, good development cooperation focuses on long-term processes that cannot be measured in terms of cause and effect. Alternative ....

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I recently attended a seminar organised by SAMEA (the South African Monitoring and Evaluation Association) on the strengths and weaknesses of conducting Impact Evaluations (IE) considering that there is a tendency to conduct IE towards the end of a programme or project, or even not at all! The guest speaker at the seminar was Dr. Howard White, an internationally reknowned evaluation guru who has led the World Bank’s IE programme ....

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It’s 23h00 at night and I’m sitting in a room far from home, about 500 km away from home, in Midrand, South Africa. I’m reflecting on whether the work that we do in Managing for Impact is all worth it. Today and tomorrow (09-10 June 2008) we’re facilitating a workshop on the Theory of Change and Logframes, and the purpose of the workshop is to facilitate a process where Civil ....

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“Stop asking us the why, what now, and so what questions. Because we are not used to answering questions; we’re used to just implementing what we’re told”. This was a reaction by one of the participants of the MfI workshop that was facilitated for the officials of the Department of Social Development in the Northern Cape province South Africa. The training was specifically organised for this group and these ....

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  As I stepped to the front of the room, I had this inner voice that kept repeating my mentor’s words “…10 people trained…so what?” And these were my first words to the team of 14 people around me comprising of donors, partners and 6 beneficiaries of the Environmental Impacts Assessment (EIA) capacity building project. This Project seeks to promote EIA professionalism by providing a “learning by doing” environment ....

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  We were on Day 5 of discussing and designing a participatory M&E system…with lots of positive feedback on this “new way of doing things”. Many individuals had come up to us, or said in plenary how excited they were to be involved in designing a system where the information would help the farmer, the researcher, the extension officer in making their own decisions.  In the managing for impact approach; ....

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Since my post on “Logic beyond the Logical framework“, we’ve now almost finished consolidating the work of the 4 different groups and putting it altogether into one MandE matrix. The first step was bringing together the theories of change as viewed by the different stakeholder groups into one Programme theory. This is what it looked like (different colors represent changes related to different stakeholder groups and the arrows illustrate linkages/relationships between changes - both within ....

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