Seven years ago, when I found myself actively involved with the social sector, I was deeply touched by the sheer number of interesting and passionate people I started meeting, all with a common goal of doing
good. The reaction to the projects I worked on, the feedback from those who it touched made the whole shift from the corporate sector so totally worth
it!
As I understood the sector better, and the process of running high
impact social projects better, I realised that in so many cases, that the
impact could have been so much more had it been captured well, gaps analysed
and addressed to make the processes more efficient. In many cases, there is
a strong "culture of doing" but an active "culture of
reflection" is missing.
In one of the projects we at niiti were working on, where large scale
rural livelihood initiatives have been deployed, we were amazed at the sheer
scale of operations, the dedication of the staff and the commitment of the organisation for grassroots level change. Its admirable because bringing large scale change at the grassroots isn't the easiest thing. It takes a
lot of hard work, unflinching commitment and selfless people to make it work.
But sometimes, "doing" can overwhelm and consume one so much
that one forgets to pause to reflect. Given that almost all social sector
projects are run rather frugally, determining from time to time whether processes
can improved to make them more efficient may actually be more helpful in achieving the final mission.
Monitoring and evaluating (M&E) projects on a regular basis help
bring in a "culture of reflection", and help identify gaps and
inefficiencies in running operations, so that they can be improved or changed to achieve better results. This of course, is easier said than done. Often, to implement a good M&E design in an organisation requires change
management strategies as a precursor. For, passionate grassroots workers may feel uncomfortable with the M&E team scrutinising their work, and may
resist or rubbish the whole process in its entirety. These are legitimate concerns
and absolutely need to be addressed. I recently chanced upon a wonderful site (http://www.unodc.org) where some
examples of the right approach to bringing in this reflective culture through implementation
of a good M&E process are.
Often, monitoring and evaluation
as a task is thought of as an end tool to "measure" social impact. Yes, it definitely could have uses to
measure social impact, but creating organisations that are open, adaptable and focussed on achieving their
social mission through processes that are most effective in a dynamic environment is a far greater output of having monitoring and evaluation programmes as an integral part of operations.
