Present at the node meeting were IICD supported projects (ACDEP, SEND Foundation, MAPRONET, WADEP, CIC Managers from Zebilla, Bolgatanga, Navorongo, Walewale, Salaga, Yendi and Bimbilla. 

Speaking on “Monitoring and Evaluation, the IICD approach”, The guest speaker, Miss Margaret Kyiu of the Development Alternative Services Foundation (DASF) explained that Monitoring is the routine and daily assessment of ongoing activities and progress while Evaluation is the periodic assessment of a project's relevance, performance, efficiency, and impact (both expected and unexpected) in relation to stated objectives.

She stated that Monitoring and Evaluation is very important for the projects and that it aimed at helping projects find out what is functioning well and what is not in a project, thereby enabling project managers to learn from past experiences and make improvements for the future. In doing this, she mentioned that trust, openness and honesty should be the guiding principles.

In the context of IICD, Miss Kyiu mentioned that Monitoring and Evaluation enables IICD to measure the development impact on the ground and look critically at their effectiveness. This is done through an online system containing 15 questionnaires in 4 languages to gather data, data analysis with major findings, focus group meetings with all project managers and team members using the major findings as the agenda, as well as focus group meetings at project level with users and writing results in learning reports.

Miss Kyiu mentioned that questionnaire were in various forms. These include online questionnaire (www.survey.iicd.org) and paper questionnaire. According to her, the questionnaires look at the respondent’s profile, use and satisfaction on project services, training(s) and IICD support, and impact of the project / training(s).

Explaining Capacity Development 1 and Capacity Development 2, she mentioned that the former is used immediately after training (project level and other IICD trainings) and could be done both online and on paper while the latter is used 3 to 6 months after training.

She stressed that trainers/training partners/training facilitators are responsible for administering CAPDEV 1 with coordination from the M&E partner while the M&E partner is responsible to collect CAPDEV 2 with support from project teams/trainer(s).

In all the situations except project implementation, Miss Kyiu said a minimum of 50 questionnaires online and using paper are to be collected. These are then entered (if paper is used) and then analysis done by the use of (SPSS) by the Monitoring and Evaluation partner and then reported.

Focus Group meetings are then held to reflect on findings at the project level and national level to give project partners and trainers the chance to discuss the causes of the identified problems of the data analysis and, in some cases, use these findings to adjust the focus of activities.

Contributing to the presentation, Mr. Mumuni Mohammed of SEND Foundation stated that one key aspect of project implementation is the aspect of field visit which is missing and he wondered how a project can be monitored when no project visit is done by the Monitoring and Evaluation Partner. The guest speaker responded by saying that the Monitoring and Evaluation Partner have no mandate to monitor.

Participants suggested that a component of Monitoring and Evaluation be included in the project budget so that projects can hire people to do the monitoring.

Participants were also of the view that the Monitoring and Evaluation process does not fit into their project plan.  Participants suggested that a roundtable meeting be organized by IICD and DASF to enable all partners to get clarity on the processes. Citing one such difficulty, project partners mentioned that it is difficult for them to collect information on the year’s activities when they are in the second quarter and are being requested to provide information on the whole year’s activities.