RBM doesn’t end with project design. The systems for monitoring and evaluation of performance and for risk management that were designed during the design phase have to be deployed during the initial stages of the project. In addition, RBM provides you with a set of tools that you can use for project management, follow-up and evaluation.
Performance is an important concept in RBM. It means the progress towards the different results. This means that monitoring isn’t restricted to verifying whether the activities take place according to planning. The plan may have to be modified, but the most important thing is to know whether the results are or will be achieved (in time). The idea behind tracking the performance through monitoring and evaluation, is to better manage the outputs and effects that are the real development results.
Compared to other approaches, RBM puts the emphasis on the effects or intermediate results (purpose of the project), instead of on the immediate results or outputs (or even activities).
However when you develop your monitoring system, in the RBM approach it is important to work on a participatory basis. In order to avoid that you develop a system that is too complex and cumbersome, you need to make sure that the monitoring system:
The information from the monitoring system should allow you to act: to modify your planning, your activities, the distribution of resources, etc. to changes in the context and to make sure that the results will be achieved.
Similarly, the evaluation of the project’s effects should be done based on participation of the stakeholders. Any evaluator (of the organisation or external) should consult the stakeholders, including the (intended) beneficiaries of the project.
The monitoring system with its indicators and description of who will measure what at which intervals (or for how long) allows you to collect information in a systematic way. Once collected, the information can be aggregated and synthesised if necessary and then be analysed.
Information gathering happens at regular intervals (daily, weekly, monthly, every 3 or 6 months or sometimes once a year) or every time an activity occurs. Sometimes this happens by going over the whole list of indicators and establishing the situation for every indicator at that moment, for instance during a monitoring mission. In this case you will get a set of information (data) at a given point in time. By putting this information in a table and adding new columns for consecutive sets, you will be able to see the evolution.
In other cases information gathering for different indicators happens at different moments and you don’t measure the whole set of indicators each time.
Using the Performance Measurement Framework, you can analyse the information that you gathered to assess:
Analyses and the conclusions are generally noted down and distributed in the form of reports. Again, keeping the participatory nature of RBM in mind, you should not forget that reporting is not something you do for the benefit of the donor and for headquarters only (upward accountability). Partners and beneficiaries must be informed too (downward accountability). The whole idea of this participatory approach to monitoring and learning is to stimulate a feeling of ownership of the project and its results by the beneficiaries.
Normally, a series of intermediate progress reports are produced over the course of a project. Often donors or organisations will have their own templates that are mandatory to use. In any case, such reports should contain:
During the project’s design phase, the risks and assumptions were identified and listed in the risk register. This risk register can be used during the execution of the project to reassess the situation and the risks periodically.
The risk register allows you to reassess whether:
It is possible that the project becomes less sensitive to certain risks over time, because the population becomes more resilient to those risks thanks to the achievements of the project. On the other hand, new and unexpected risks may materialise. This may even lead to a situation where it becomes practically impossible or too dangerous to continue the project. In such extreme cases, the information gathered using the risk register may help you support your decisions and convince your donor.