BDS market development guide.pdf - PACA

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produce roughly accurate data—they may be wildly misleading. 47 Although case studies may
generate valuable qualitative insights, in general there is widespread dissatisfaction with the
usefulness of monitoring and evaluation for project managers. Responding to this situation,
market development perspective assesses change within SMEs by:
# Using common market-research tools to assess their perception and use of services as
consumers;
# Using case studies to gain a deeper understanding of how BDS can impact on business
processes and performance; and
# Leaving rigorous impact assessment to “one-off” scientific approaches (these will usually
need to be instigated and resourced externally).
WHAT’S NEW IN MONITORING AND EVALUATION: WHY WE MEASURE
Although monitoring and evaluation generally is concerned with performance measurement
for management decision-making, accountability, and learning purposes, in specific terms it
has two objectives:
• Improving Performance: helping organizations (and their managers)—donors,
facilitators, and providers—improve what they do, that is, offering them the right kind of
information at the right time so they can make the right decisions.
• Proving Impact: helping prove that a BDS intervention has led to positive and significant
change.
Both of these reasons—improving performance and proving impact—are important and
valid. But it is also important to realize they are different. The first serves an operational and
business-oriented interest; the second is associated with a wider, strategic, economic, and
social (and political) perspective—especially those of development agency funders. Knowing
why monitoring and evaluation information is required leads to different conclusions about
what should be measured and therefore on how they are measured. For example:
• Providers’ direct interest is the profitability of services and the direct feedback from
SMEs on quality and satisfaction; with this knowledge, they can make appropriate
improvements.
• Facilitators are also interested in the above but, pursuing the overall objective of market
development, want to know about the volume of transactions, number of providers, and
the like.
47 Commonly (if privately) development professionals will admit to having little confidence in the data
generated through such surveys.
Microenterprise Best Practices
Development Alternatives, Inc.