Getting the Right End of the Stick: Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation in an Organizational Context

Background

This chapter documents the process by which CARE Zambia institutionalized a learning approach to their internal management and a participatory model of monitoring and evaluation as well as the results of this transition, using a food security project as a case study. CARE Zambia used seven principles to turn themselves into a 'learning organization': 1) thrive on change, 2) facilitate learning from the surrounding environment, 3) facilitate learning from staff, 4) encourage experimentation, 5) communicate sucesses and failures, 6) reward learning, and 7) promote a sense of caring.

Conclusions & Takeaways

By analyzing their case study in implementing participatory monitoring and evaluation in a project, the organization concluded that participation is a process and must be allotted adequate time, learning needs to be integral to activities, villagers need to have a role in project design beyond just collecting information, and that capacity-building is most succesful when it is owned by villagers. Their process also revealed that the most important challenge to implementing participatory techniques is getting staff, who have operated under conventional centralized models, to avoid just extracting information and instead empower participants through self-monitoring and learning.