• Home
• Site Map
• Foreword
  • Foreword
  • Contributors & Copyright
• Introduction
  • Introduction
  • Methods
  • Sites
    • Why Pando and East Kalimantan?
    • Municipal Governments and Decentralisation in Bolivia
    • Municipal Governments and Decentralisation in Indonesia
• Part I. Concepts
  • Wellbeing and Poverty
    • Poverty is More Than Low Income
    • Poverty is a Lack of Wellbeing
    • Poverty and Wellbeing Have Many Dimensions
    • Further Reading
  • Local Governments and Poverty
    • How can Local Governments Reduce Poverty?
    • Four Steps to Improve Local Governmental Action
    • Further Reading
  • Forests and Poverty
    • How do Forests Influence Poverty?
    • What is Poverty in Forest Communities?
    • Are Forests Safety Nets, Poverty Traps or Escape Routes?
    • Further Reading
• Part II. Tools
  • Monitoring
    • What is monitoring?
    • Types of Monitoring
    • Indicators
    • When to monitor?
    • Who conducts monitoring?
    • Linking monitoring to planning
  • Participatory Planning
    • What is participatory planning?
    • Why is participatory planning useful?
    • When and where is participatory planning done?
    • Who should participate?
  • Tool 1: Interactive Mapping
    • What is interactive mapping?
    • Interactive mapping step-by-step
    • Use interactive mapping for monitoring
  • Tool 2: Wellbeing Monitoring
    • What is a local wellbeing monitoring system?
    • Wellbeing monitoring step-by-step
    • Step 1: Define purpose, develop plan and budget
    • Step 2: Develop local poverty indicators and formulate survey questions
    • Step 3: Design the sampling strategy
    • Step 4: Train staff and perform the survey
    • Step 5: Analyse and present the data
    • Step 6: Present findings
  • Tool 3: Community Evaluation
    • Evaluating local government programmes through community focus groups
    • Steps 1-3
    • Steps 4-6
    • Steps 7-8
    • Community evaluation step-by-step
  • Tool 4: Scenario-based Planning
    • What is scenario-based planning?
    • Scenario-based planning step-by-step
    • Visioning
    • Pathways
• Final Remarks
• Acknowledgements
• Additional Resources
• PDF Version

Step 1. Define the purpose of the evaluation

It is important to agree upon the purpose and expectations of the evaluation from the very beginning. Organise meetings with local government officials and community leaders and discuss the following points:

• What is the purpose of the evaluation? Is it to improve the implementation of an ongoing programme or to improve the planning of future projects?
  
• Who is the main driver of the evaluation? Is it the local government that needs feedback on its programme implementation? Is it the community that complains about mismatch between needs and government assistance?
  
• What are appropriate focus groups? How should the diversity within the community be captured?
  
• Who should facilitate the evaluation? Contracting a trained facilitator could reduce conflicts of interest or manipulation of the participants, but can the added cost be covered or will an outsider lack knowledge about local dynamics?
  
• What will happen with the evaluation report? Can it be sent directly to the local government or should it be shared with the mass media to avoid it being too easily hidden?
  
• How will the evaluation be linked to the local development planning process? And how can it be institutionalised?
  

Once the discussions are complete, the organisers compile a brief statement of purpose for the evaluation, explaining the methods and goals as well as ensuring that government agencies and communities understand the process and the expected outputs. The statement should then be distributed to local government officials and communities.

Step 2. Decide the timing of the evaluation

The timing needs to be adjusted to the annual planning cycle of the local government. Coordinate the timing with the local government to ensure that the evaluation report can be fed back into the official planning process. The evaluation should also precede the annual community planning (see Tool 4), so that lessons learned from the previous year can be incorporated into the new development plan.

Step 3. Recruit facilitators

Identify interested and suitable organisations or individuals to perform the evaluation and facilitate the activities. Facilitators must be experienced at running meetings, encouraging discussion, and balancing diverse opinions. Facilitators might be from the communities, the local government or from an independent organisation. Drawing from all of these groups is highly recommended, though some consistency is needed to allow tracking changes over time. Decide carefully—the facilitators should not have any personal interest in the outcome of the evaluation.

Community members can facilitate if they are sufficiently experienced. However, there are drawbacks to using community facilitators, as they may have a vested interest and try to influence the process disproportionately. In addition, some communities may lack the capacity to conduct the evaluation by themselves.
Local government officials may be good facilitators if there is political support in government for the process. The involvement of government officials means that the evaluations can be repeated in many locations, and possibly be repeated annually. The results of a community evaluation led by local government can directly feed into the government planning process. Government officials, however, may influence what people say in the meetings. Community members may feel inhibited when expressing negative or critical views about the government’s work.
For a more independent evaluation, involve NGOs, universities or other independent organisations. These organisations are more likely to have skilled facilitators. However, this might incur additional costs. Because the evaluation should be performed yearly, the costs of having an independent organisation perform the evaluation must be budgeted annually.

Box 30 summarises the pros and cons of facilitation of community evaluations by different actors.

© 2007 Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
Contributors and copyright information