Monitoring and Evaluation can hide faults
Imagine an organisation that sits back to review the problems of the poor. Looking down on high from the comfort of an air-conditioned office they believe that the problem of these people must be high population growth rate. Everyone is talking about it. And that women have little say in how many children they want, or even when they want to have them....we'll need to add that because funders like us to include women in our projects.
Let's strike a deal with a consultant. The consultant might not know anything about our organisation, or even the people we want to help, but it would look good to have a proposal written by an outsider from a fancy consulting group. If they're successful with a proposal then we can squeeze their fee out of a research and development budget line. If not, we don't have to pay them.
The beauty of this is that the consultant knows what the finder wants to read. They can develop a monitoring system that perfectly fits the needs of the funder. Our chances will be greater. We don't want risks. Our salaries are at stake. The money arrives.
The community is given a 2 hour lecture on the benefits of family planning, the need to guard against AIDS, and the importance of ensuring that women have a say in this process. They all applaud. Someone has travelled far to help them see how their behaviour is wrong, but they might just have something useful for them too.
Cue the mighty condom,
Condoms are brought en masse to the community. Distributed to women and men alike. Everyone is happy. The organisation is particularly happy because they are trying to monitor the success of their work by using condoms. The more condoms they distribute to people the more successful their project.
The project was a success. Monitoring showed that the number of times that condoms were requested increased rapidly over the course of the project. Thousands were purchased and disbursed. Some of the men were even buying their own! This was reported back to the finders.
Trouble is, pretty useful things are condoms, one of those multipurpose contraptions. They're good as water carriers. They've been used to rope a side minor onto a pick up. Even the young lads run around using them for catapult elastic. And in this case, they are used to monitor and evaluate the development project.
And so birth rates showed an increase.
What went wrong?
At the outset, they thought they knew the problems that the people were facing. But they didn't go and talk with them, listen to them, live with them. They didn't understand the people they were trying to help. They didn't even know the name of the village they were going to bring condoms too. They submitted their proposal and in it they demonstrated clearly that they could monitor the use of funders' money by taking inventories of condoms purchased, condoms distributed and so on. These were to be the outputs by which the project's success would be judged. The indicator they would use to substantiate this was increased number of requests for condoms during the project's life. The funder made listing of outputs and associated indicators a condition for any project and its monitoring as part of their funding policy.
Another small problem: circumcision is a widespread practice in this area of Ghana. It is a cultural thing. It's in people's minds It's clean and hygienic. It has been performed for generations. It's not questioned because it is proper. It is right.
So Abdallah lmoro - who's been lectured about civilisation and the condom - has a small razor blade. He circumcises the condom…
The project was a resounding success - to everyone except the people the project was supposed to help.
So judging the success of a project is more than an arithmetical exercise. It's discovering the advance in human terms. A school is more than bricks and mortar. It's liberation for its pupils.