by Adriane Del Torto
West and East have joined efforts once again for an
important learning event, this time providing a platform to share experiences
in Monitoring and Evaluation for Francophone Countries in West and Central
Africa (WCA) and East and Southern Africa (ESA). This morning (2 December), IFAD had the honour
of His Excellency Mr Mamadou Sangafowa Coulibaly, Minister of Agriculture of
the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire opening the Monitoring and Evaluation Workshop
held in Grand Bassam (suburb of Abidjan, Historical City of Côte d’Ivoire and UNESCO Heritage site) at the N’SA Hotel.
In his opening statement, the Director of the West and
Central Africa Division of IFAD underlined the importance of M&E for
results based management to for a “ better chance at reaching development
objectives” while assuring us that “there is a direct link between good
management and project performance.” His Excellency the Minister of Agriculture
was very proud to personally open an IFAD workshop as IFAD has always had
quality activities in Côte d’Ivoire, but most importantly because “IFAD never
left our sides even during the most difficult we have gone through. IFAD
continued to save lives by continuing to
support agricultural production in areas where even nationals would no longer
set foot.”
In his welcoming words, Mr de Willebois underlined the
importance of M&E in projects so as to better report on real impact on the
field, learn from mistakes and design better agriculture development
programmes, truly aimed and helping the rural poor.
The objective of a workshop with a cross-cutting theme such
as M&E is to ensure that there is a common understand of M&E, its
concepts and requirements of IFAD in terms of RIMS (Results and Impact
Monitoring System), by giving projects time and space to discuss and share
experiences to build on to improve M&E systems, tools, reporting and in the
longer term improve results and impact of development projects.
After setting the scene with our M&E specialists and
facilitators from WCA’s 3SL Grant with IED Afrique, the participants
approximately 120 from some 20 countries in Sub-Saharan African (coordinators,
M&E officers, CPMs, CPOs etc) broke
up into groups to discuss their logical frameworks and results chains.
The day was filled with heated but cordial and sometimes
funny debates on this apparently passionate topic. At the end of the day, it was
clear, however, that concepts are not always as straight forward as we believe and that there is plenty of
room for interpretation…So we will continue discussions in the coming 4 days,
with emphasis on exchanges of
experiences among practitioners .
Do feel free to comment on this post to contribute to this
discussion. You can also follow the workshop on Twitter #ifadme @adeltorto or
through @IFADnews, your opinions and contributions are most welcome in the
debate.
The workshop will be running until Friday 6 December 2013.
Please stay tuned for some interesting material on workshop content and
discussions in the days to come.
