Opinion and Analysis
By Mike Eldon, meldon@symphony.co.ke
Hands up all those who know what “M&E”
stands for. Almost everyone in the public sector, and those in the
development world, will know what this is.
Almost no one in the private sector will though.
Including me until a few years ago when I started interacting more
intimately with government bodies, NGOs and donors. Oh, and by the way,
for those whose hands remained lowered, it stands for “monitoring and
evaluation”.
It’s not that those in the business world don’t
monitor or evaluate. On the contrary, they do a better job of both and
are much more likely to take the process to its logical conclusion –
that is, they will do something about what is off track to try and
ensure the desired results are still delivered on time, to budget and at
the right quality. In the private sector they tend to call it
performance management.
This is why I wish the government and development
communities would use that term rather than M&E, which too often
covers some of the necessary while falling far short of the sufficient.
There’s no chance of that rebranding though, since
the existing term is too deeply entrenched. What a shame, for as I got
to learn about how M&E has been working — and often not working — in
the public sector I heard much about what a tough sell it is, even at a
basic level.
The resistance to it has been for one obvious
reason: no one likes to be monitored or evaluated. And no one relishes
the transparency and accountability that accompanies it.
Why? Almost everyone — ironically including the
best performers — fears they will be found wanting, and that their
bosses will hammer them for falling short.
It’s worse if they are ranked and the ranking is
made public. What if they emerge near the bottom of the class? Such
fears have sometimes led those being evaluated managing to set
themselves unambitious targets that they are more likely to achieve.
M&E involves lots of work in deciding what
data to collect, and then gathering and processing it all. It also
requires discipline to enter what is being monitored accurately and on
time, imposing a heavy burden of time and effort.
Another challenge is that too much of what is
being M&E’d is not meaningful enough. It’s what you might call safe
and lazy M&E.
Take training 100 people involved in a project to
deliver its success, and assume they must attend a two-day workshop to
do so. A safe measure is to ask if the workshop activity took place and
if they did all attend.
In M&E jargon, the percentage graduating
constitutes an “output” measure, where the best that can be said is that
something did happen, something that was easy to measure.
But what about the “so what?” of having attended
the workshop? Did it develop the needed knowledge, skills and attitudes?
It is only if the answer is positive that M&E professionals would
say that an acceptable “outcome” has been achieved.
But there’s yet another step. For they may have
acquired what it takes but still not apply it to deliver the intended
“impact”.
The more M&E systems evolve from assessing
mere outputs to studying outcomes and impacts, the more challenging it
is to come up with suitable measures of what has been achieved
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