Mid Term EVALUATION PLI II project - CARE International's ...

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IBTCI – Mid-Term Performance Evaluation of the Pastoral Livelihoods Initiative Phase II (PLI II) - DRAFT event, leadership, both within the consortium and within USAID, is certainly an important element. The first few months in the life of a “new” consortium is the most critical period when experienced leadership from the consortium partners and from USAID needs to have sufficient time available to focus on establishing clear administrative procedures. 3.4.2 Resource planning process According to the information reported to the evaluation team, the PLI II consortium did not begin to function as a unity until about a year and half after the awarding of the cooperative agreement. Because each of the partners was allocated its own budgets and responsibilities as part of the overall cooperative agreement, each partner simply commenced activities independently. It is only during the past few months that the consortium has begun to function as a unity. In the project’s plan there was the intention to establish five Technical Working Groups (TWG). Meetings of these groups were suspended in 2011 due, among other reasons, to most of the partners being engaged in CM activity. In 2012 TWG meetings have recommenced, beginning with the health and natural resource management TWGs. Economic strengthening and livestock TWGs are planned. The other crosscutting issues (gender and “do no harm”) are being conducted as part of the main TWG meetings. The evaluation team was given some indication of partner dissatisfaction over the speed of being authorized resources to implement CM activities; however, one of the advantages of the consortium structure is that it speeds the ability of USAID to get funds to the locales where they are most needed. In general, it is the team’s impression that resources were adequately and transparently shared among partners. Where there were inadequate resources in terms of program funds and personnel in the field, this was the responsibility of the individual partner. PLI II partners felt that the amounts allocated for the CM were not close to meeting a significant proportion of the need, as evidenced by the number of beneficiaries whom the CM was able to assist . 3.4.3 Communication and coordination According to recent annual and quarterly reports, there have been regular and timely meetings of the senior management staff. The major breakdown has been in the technical/sectoral area, where the proposed TWG structure has only recently been recommenced. Different partners have expressed frustration at this failure, as most felt that they have lessons to share and information to learn. The TWG are now starting to function. It would be useful if, on a rotating basis, PLI II could adopt a system whereby the technical specialists from each implementer could identify intervention(s) or adjustments that they have found particularly effective and make a presentation at a TWG meeting that counterparts could learn from and share with their own field staff. 3.4.4 M&E Although the usefulness of the M&E system is hampered by the lack of project baseline information except for MNCH, the M&E system seems generally adequate and appropriate. However, it was not until the last week of work in-country that the team received many key M&E documents and had the opportunity to discuss M&E with the PLI II COP and M&E Specialist. They informed us that their greatest M&E concern was in developing a harmonized M&E system that all partners could utilize. There is a challenge in melding project-specific indicators with the standard indicators that each partner’s organization uses for itself. This last issue is related to the whole coordination problem stated above. One complicating factor in obtaining the documents is that the Planned vs. Achieved reports, which form the reporting heart of the M&E system, for livelihoods and health-related activities are kept separately from M&E materials for the other components for which PLI II reports because they have different reporting formats and go to different offices than the other PLI II activities. PLI II M&E staff feel DRAFT 14
IBTCI – Mid-Term Performance Evaluation of the Pastoral Livelihoods Initiative Phase II (PLI II) - DRAFT that combining the three sets of reports in a single book of spreadsheets would be excessively cumbersome to use in practice. As specific observations and recommendations: 1. The PMP was revised in 2010 to reflect changed perspectives during the first year of implementation and, we were told, a participatory process involving all IPs took place. The monitoring sheets for NRM, Livestock, and Livelihoods are included in the PMP workbook and appear to be relevant and readily understandable by project staff in the field. 2. The key consortium working document appears to be the quarterly Planned vs. Achievement table of activities, which contains some 300+ entries. As discussed in 3.2.1, as the project has evolved, some activities have become moot, irrelevant, impossible to conduct, and/or subsumed in subsequent work. We recommend that PLI II make appropriate updates with annotations as to activities which are now obsolete. Associated with this, changes in activities frequently entail changes in training; we believe that it would be highly valuable to ensure that these changes in training be clearly identified along with adjustments in the training plans. • Training is currently listed, appropriately, under the strategies with which the training is associated. However, in order to assist in planning, PLI II management might find it useful to link the training items onto a separate, but linked spreadsheet delineating PLI II training as a whole. • We recognize that there may be an issue of compatibility with an implementer’s organizational M&E structures, but often the PLI II partners do not use the same language to report on what appear to be highly similar activities, e.g., under Strategy 1.2.3, Improve the availability and access to cereal, IRC and CARE report on “Form cereal bank groups and establish contact with active cereal bank groups,” SC UK reports on “Establish cereal marketing groups” and “Injection of seed capital to cereal bank group,” and SC US reports on “Strengthening existing cereal bank groups including injection of seed capital.” 3. SC-US sent us only the Detailed Implementation Plan (DIP), which feeds into the Planned vs. Achievement table, for its own activities. Spot-checking, we noted that the figures for Targets were typed in and sometimes differed from the figures derived from summing the monthly Plan figures (e.g., Summary sheet Row 23). We do recognize that sometimes there can be reasons for this (e.g., Liben Row 166, where the actual target is marked in red), but feel that intended variations should be noted in the Remarks column. Also, there is a very obvious error with the figures for Strategy 1.3.2.1 (Summary Row 55), particularly in the figure for March. 3.4.5 The Overall Project Management Environment Although PLI II got off to a slow start, the senior Consortium Partners management staff has expressed satisfaction with the current administrative leadership provided by SC-US PLI II Unit. It is unfortunate that it took more than a year and a half before effective leadership was provided to the consortium. In terms of planned activities, most of the partners have not met their stated implementation goals; however, they are definitely aware of the issues and have been developing strategies to address them . During this last year of funding, it is clear that a major effort is underway to rectify this deficiency. DRAFT 15
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