ANNUAL REPORT_2008.pdf - Rural Water Supply and Sanitation ...

testing and mitigation, (vi) arsenic removal,
(vii) environmental quality control, and (viii)
environmental management action plan.
The Board is practicing social appraisal for
scheme-level monitoring on top of its regular
third party monitoring through Social Audit
Committees. The Board also pilots social
accountability using community score cards
to more efficiently ensure transparency and
accountability. This would help to learn from
the field experiences for improving
governance and social accountability aspects
throughout the scheme cycle. The process
will not only facilitate the implementation of
drinking water supply schemes but where
all levels of service delivery and development
activities are at the community level ensure
that it happens in a transparent and
accountable manner. A survey of 820
schemes out of the total 1314 schemes that
were completed between August 1999 and
July 2008 found that at least 82 percent of the
communities had maintained their accounts
in a satisfactory manner. The same survey,
which was conducted in Dec 2008, also found
that 83 percent of the schemes had displayed
the records publicly on display boards.
Governance reforms in Nepal have been
considered essential for sectoral interventions
supported by the World Bank. The
Government’s efforts towards reforms
include enactment of the new Anti-
Corruption Act in 2002, enactment of the
Public Procurement Act in 2007 and Right to
Information Act in 2007. The Board has been
supporting the Government’s reform efforts,
including its enactment of the new Anti-
Corruption Act in 2002, the Public
Procurement Act in 2007 and the Right to
Information (RTI) Act in 2007.
Monitoring
and Evaluation
A
broader and yet comprehensive M&E system is applied
by the Board with four elements or types of monitoring
Lsegments – community monitoring, compliance and
process monitoring, outcome and impact monitoring,
and strategic monitoring. The community monitoring includes the
perceptions of the community/users/WUSC of the services and facilities
provided including the self-situation analysis. This will focus on users’
capacity to manage the assets and awareness generated by participation
in the Board program. Support organizations facilitate its respective
communities to do the assessment. Compliance monitoring focuses on
physical, financial and logistic aspects of projects, while process
monitoring deals with critical processes which are directly related to the
project’s objectives. The process monitoring examines the suitability
and effectiveness of community processes such as social mobilization,
project implementation methodology such as community selection
criteria and the impact of the project on capacity-building of
communities. The outcome and impact monitoring attempts to assess
the changes generated by the activities, inputs, and services in terms of
the long-term objectives of the Board focusing primarily on the key
development impact indicators as described earlier. The strategic
monitoring is geared to documenting, disseminating, and learning from
experience specifically focusing on key subject matter of importance.
The Board’s adaptive and programmatic approach requires feedback
on which approaches are working well and which are not.
The Board and its partner organizations, the community, SO and SA
and the local authority (DDC/VDC) all are involved in monitoring and
evaluation systems of program activities. All the data and information
received from partner organizations in well developed formats are
computerized and stored in the Board’s Management Information
System (MIS) since RWSSP-I.
Gradual improvements are being taken place in this system in RWSSP-
II to support management to manage project related information and
facilitate for efficient monitoring and evaluation. Apart from Project
Management Information System (PMIS), which is in practice from
RWSSP-I, Technical Management Information System (TMIS) and
Financial Management Information System (FMIS) are in practice in
RWSSP-II. At present, the MIS Unit has been facilitating the Board staff
for IT Logistic/Equipments, bridging information in network, managing
web site, considering/implementing safe guard for data security and
virus threat issues. In addition, this unit has deployed automated backup
system for data protection at client side, while the three server that
control complete network system has been mirrored to stay secure
with last minute updated data.
Having realized some technical problems in the existing MIS system
and to make it more users’ friendly and informative, the Board finally
agreed to go in Web-Centric technology so that it is accessible from the
internet which also includes the migration of TMIS and FMIS on similar
technology. Web-Centric MIS System is developed in year 2008 and it is
installed for experiment in some of the computers of the Board. This
new system will be operationalized by early 2009.
24 · RWSSFDB Annual Report 2008