This week we spent preparing for the Facilitator Training that was to be conducted on the 30th. The CBM (Community Based Monitoring) program is currently conducted in 3 blocks made up of 48 villages. There are actually 49 CBM sites since 1 village had enough of a population split in 2 distinct areas that it was decided to do 2 monitoring areas.
Mayank (in green), Dilip (in stripes), and me working on the survey questions.
Facilitators, during the meeting, completing a feedback assignment for Unnati.
I spent most of this week working with Dilip and Mayank. Dilip is a Jodhpur local and works for Unnati. Dilip is the point person for the CBM program as well as other Unnati projects and knows the facilitators and villagers very well. Mayank is from Gujarat and is a consultant attached to the Gujarat office of Unnati. When the CBM program was first conceptualized, he conducted the first training session with the facilitators in February.
My work with them consisted of going through the 200 or so questions that were split into monthly and bi-annual surveys. Each consisted of about 100 questions that we would need totals on for the entire block and to be able to track changes as well as percentages. A simple, although very time consuming, Excel spreadsheet was set up in order to do this.
On the 30th, I gave what I thought was to be a brief Power Point. It ended up being about 2 hours of questions and discussions. My main pints were for the facilitators to concentrate on first being facilitators and not implementors. Second, we went through some samples of incomplete answers and how we were changing the answers to be yes or no, which would be marked as 1 or 0. This way we could look at the totals for the block and see how many issues we had in a particular block. There were also questions that required actual numbers instead of yes/no answers, so these were further explained.
A quote I used to introduce CBM was: "Community based monitoring is not formal monitoring and evaluation. It does not aim to make a statement about the impact of a community development project. It is, instead, a tool for building communities' capacity to direct their development."
Community-Based Monitoring and Evaluation Team, “Sleeping on our Own Mats: An Introductory Guide to Community-Based Monitoring and Evaluation, October 2002, p.2. The World Bank Rural Development II Africa region.
Below is also a chart I created to describe how the communication and feedback process works and how eventually the Citizen's Collective would take charge of their own governance.
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