TITLE:
Effectiveness of Remote Monitoring and Evaluation by Development Agencies during COVID Pandemic: A Case of IFAD Supervision/Implementation Missions in Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya
AUTHORS:
Rose Bakenegura Namara
KEYWORDS:
COVID 19, Remote Monitoring and Evaluation, IFAD Projects, East Africa
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.12 No.12,
December
13,
2024
ABSTRACT: Having effective monitoring and evaluation (M&E) process is beneficial to the organisations and stakeholders. In ideal situations, effective M&E process help programmes/projects to run efficiently while stakeholders to receive feedback about the project, learn and improve project implementation. During COVID 19 lockdowns, many development agencies found themselves adopting remote M&E to continue to evaluate their programme, offer supervision and implementation support-a practice that has somehow continued to date. Existing literature on remote monitoring and evaluation during COVID 19 focus on explaining the changing approaches from the conventional to those tailored to the COVID 19 context, the technological advancements and tools and their limitations in maintaining data quality and project oversight. However, the effectiveness of the remote M&E missions by carried out by development agencies during COVID 19 in terms of enhancing accountability and learning, stakeholder participation, seem to be less explored. This is an exploratory study which sought to investigate whether the remote monitoring and evaluation missions enabled organisations to achieve the normative agenda of M&E including enhancing accountability/learning, stakeholder participation, and efficiency of the projects? The study also analyses the implication of remote monitoring and evaluation to the evaluation theory and practice. The study was conducted using an online self-administered questionnaire among evaluation managers, mission teams, and evaluators who participated in International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) supervision/implementation support monitoring and evaluation missions in Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya during COVID 19 in Rwanda and Uganda. Findings show that remote monitoring and evaluation missions largely achieved the basic objectives of M&E of continuing to guide project implementation. However, remote M&E saw an implementer taking on the role of an evaluator-collecting data and providing M&E reports (secondary data) to the remote external evaluators. The concept of delegation was introduced into monitoring and evaluation practices as the local teams including implementers and sometimes local office staff, who could possibly access the project sites often wore lenses of external evaluators. Also, remote monitoring and evaluation has resurrected the debate on the importance of internal monitoring and evaluation and gave more power and prominence to the local evaluators in relation to external evaluators.