OL 343 Assignment Five Homework
Online Learning: OL 343 Adapting to Climate Change: The Community Focus.
https://csd-i.org/ol-344-adapting-climate-change/

This week’s resources:
Assignment Five Discussion
Magee Example Project Assignment Five

CARE: Framework of Milestones and Indicators for Community Based Adaptation

https://careclimatechange.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/CBA_Framework.pdf

FAO: training module on participatory community monitoring and evaluation

http://www.fao.org/docrep/006/AD346E/ad346e0e.htm

Intercooperation: Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation-Field Experiences
https://sswm.info/sites/default/files/reference_attachments/Intercooperation%202005%20Participatory%20Monitoring%20And%20Evaluation.pdf

Assignment Five. Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (PME): Community Based M&E Plan
Simplifying your monitoring and evaluation plan with user-friendly indicators

Introduction
There are many resources on PME—but these three documents I’m providing in this assignment do the best job of demonstrating this important concept at a practical level. The FA0 document does an extraordinary job in a short space in describing the philosophy and practical reasons for practicing PME. The CARE document is a tremendous resource of community-based indicators for a number of different kinds of projects. If your specific project isn’t among the examples—no problem—the way these examples are laid out you can simply adapt them to a different project’s needs.

The Intercooperation document does an excellent job of laying out the different opportunities that you have for participatory monitoring. You’ve already done some of this over the past few assignments and so you will be able to use your information from those participatory monitoring meetings for this assignment. But this document will help you to clarify your thoughts. For example on pages 5 through 8, it does a good job of describing the different types of PME methods. It also sets the stage for determining community friendly indicators. For example look on page 8 number 3.

My skill sets development workshop from last week’s assignment was really a Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation mapping exercise in disguise. Consequently my favorite part of the Intercooperation document is found on page 16: Participatory resource mapping: the method.

It was a prelude to the actual skill sets development but created a discussion forum that allowed the community to actually understand firsthand what their challenges were, what the skills were they needed to develop in order to face those challenges, and to develop a sense of where they were today—and document the information (baseline). 

If you look on page 19, you can see before and after maps at the top of the page—and a compilation of before and after data at the bottom of the page. These two columns of baseline and one year later are the basis for my example in this week’s assignment. These are things that communities can relate to long after we are gone—and this is the purpose of this week’s assignment: Good Luck!

Part One. Community Based Logframe with M&E Indicators
I would like for you to go back to Assignment One of OL 344, and find the CBA program outline that you shared with your community in the second assignment on co-management. For me, this represents about 40% of my entire project.

Open up your project log frame and save it as:
Magee, OL 344 Assignment Five Logframe with Community Based Indicators for M&E Plan.doc

Delete the portion of the log frame that doesn’t relate to your CBA program. Look at the CARE: Framework Of Milestones and Indicators for Community-Based Adaptation for ideas of indicators that you can use in your log frame. You’ll notice that they offer indicators for the household level, local government, and at the national level. Most of you are working at the community/individual level so concentrate on those indicators.

Delete your indicators and means of verification. Concentrate on the outputs and sub-goals/outcomes and place in the cells appropriate indicators which your community committee members will be able to relate to and will be able to use.

The purpose here, is to begin a two-way conversation over the next few months in an effort to clarify these new indicators so that the committee members understand them, are comfortable with them, and feel as if they will be able to monitor them during the life of the project, and take over this process during project handover.

When the project is handed over, you will need to sit down and revise the M&E plan—and probably the indicators to reflect the fact that some of the outputs have been completed and no longer need to be monitored nor evaluated. Your newly revised M&E plan at that point will most likely be focused on simply the outcomes and the long-term impact.

Part Two. Community Based M&E Schedule
I would like for you to go back to Assignment One of OL 344, and find the CBA program schedule that you shared with your community in the second assignment on co-management.

Save your schedule as:
Magee, OL 344 Assignment Five Schedule for Community M&E Plan.xls

Delete the portion of the schedule that doesn’t relate to your CBA program. Leave the monthly blue bars in place for now. Look at your original indicators for your CBA program and your original schedule and determine where you would need to monitor activity to show that an output has been completed and fulfilled its goal.

This monitoring should be specific to the new community-based indicators that you’ve just added to your log frame. This monitoring schedule should be less complex in the number of things to be monitored than your personal monitoring schedule may be.

In other words, your personal monitoring of the project may be ‘scoped-in’ looking at detailed activities. The community based schedule may want to be ‘scoped-out’ and look at more of the completed output, goal/outcome level.

I put yellow stars in the months where I felt the community should be involved in the M&E plan.

You may remember earlier in this course how you needed to supplement the dates with seasonal illustrations so that all persons in a community meeting would be able to relate to the schedule—you may need to do that again.

The homework to turn in will be:
1. A Logframe with Community Based Indicators.
2. A Schedule noting which months the Community should be involved in the M&E plan.

Go to Magee’s Example Project Assignment Five to see what this could look like.

See you next week.