spotlight madagascar

As I enter my final month here at Centre Mandrosoa, I’ve been mulling over questions about monitoring and evaluation – how do we figure out what all of our work here means for the people of Ambositra? Without answering that question, there’s no way to go forward, to adapt to the ever-changing situation at the grassroots level, using available technology and appropriate human resources management strategies.  There’s more than one way to skin a chicken, as they say, and there’s more than one way to evaluate a project such as this. ICT initiatives are relatively new, and somewhat difficult to evaluate. We have a chance to do something really innovative here with regard to community participation and beneficiary-driven impact assessment that involves a wide range of stakeholders.

ICTs like Centre Mandrosoa are designed to alleviate poverty while enhancing local enterprise, but access and infrastructure isn’t what it’s all about – ICTs have countless linkages with development. From improving health services to empowering women and vulnerable populations, building capacity of farmers to preserving cultural resources, monitoring the environment to bridging the gap between right and poor – there’s nothing that ICTs can’t touch. Of course, there are tangible outcomes – numbers of telecenter users, community statistics, charts and graphs providing economic and financial data. But what about the intangibles? Developing those types of indicators demands participation and good data collection tools and techniques – and this type of evaluation will take a long time to do right.

Centre Mandrosoa Owner/Operator Jean Yves

So which evaluation technique to we use? Can we examine the conventional, donor-driven evaluation model? I don’t think so. Maybe utilizing the sustainable livelihoods framework that incorporates a human rights-based model is appropriate, or would it be better to look at this using a village development capacity index? Perhaps we can combine them all! Stakeholders from the Entrepeneur Owner to the Chamber of Commerce, to telecenter users to trainees, to donors and local government – all of these will have invaluable input into this process. I’ll be working over the next couple of weeks to outline everything with Jean Yves and the other stakeholders. I’m committed to starting at logframe and revisiting the whole goals/purpose/outcomes/activities business, working through stakeholder analysis, developing evaluation questions and an indicator matrix – I’ve got my work cut out for me! And so does the next volunteer…