• 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 4. Identify and select the participants

In each community, there will be certain people who are most familiar with a programme’s implementation and impacts. The nature of the programme will determine who should be included in the evaluation. For instance, parents can provide information on education programmes, while youths will be knowledgeable about a recently built sports facility. Some projects have impacts on everyone. In those cases, ask a diverse representation of the community to participate in the evaluation.

Try to have representation of all groups within the community. Weaker or marginalised participants can form a separate group where they feel more encouraged to voice their own opinions.

Step 5. Develop a data collection form

Create a simple form for collecting data. This form will focus the discussion and data collection on the most important issues and make compilation of results easier. (See Box 31 for an example.)

Step 6. Facilitate the evaluation activities

The steps below describe how to facilitate the evaluation using focus group discussions.

• List the programmes to be evaluated. Write down a list of the programmes that should have been implemented in the community. Identify which agency is responsible for each programme. Additional sources of information can include government annual budget allocations and reports, interviews with government officials, and interviews with community leaders.
  
• Identify the expected outcomes and impacts of each programme. Discuss the expectations of each programme:
  
  • What was the programme supposed to do?
    
  • Who was it supposed to help?
    
  • How many individuals or communities should have benefited?
    
  • How long was it supposed to run?
    
• Note these discussions in the ‘Comments’ area of the form.
  
• If programmes are nationally driven, compare expected outcomes as reported in national government documents with community expected outcomes to observe and understand how and why they differ.
  
• Discuss the actual implementation and impact of each programme:
  
  • Who participated?
    
  • How were decisions made?
    
  • How was the budget used?
    
  • Were the technical specifications met?
    
  • Who benefited from the programme?
    
  • How could the implementation have been better?
    
  • How could the programme have had better results?
    
  • How should reporting be done?
    
• Make notes of these discussions on the ‘Comments’ area of the form.
  
• Vote on the implementation and impact of each project. Ask participants to assign a value to the implementation and the impact of individual projects or programmes. This should be an anonymous process to encourage honest opinions. One approach is to use cards (see Figure 18). Have participants note their evaluation on the cards, for instance + (positive or good implementation or impact), 0 (neutral) and – (negative or bad). Remind participants that it is important that each person votes according to his or her personal opinion.

Figure 18. Using cards to vote during the evaluation.

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