APR and PMLT training

Last year I was involved in VSO’s process of Annual Partnership Reviews, and led 25 workshops with partners to help the Programme Office to complete the partnership monitoring and learning tool (PMLT) for all 25 partners. The APR and PMLT are relatively new processes for VSO, designed to meet the increasing need for monitoring and evaluation across the international development sector. After receiving all APR results for last year, VSO’s Monitoring and Evaluation team analysed the effectiveness of the approach, and formulated even clearer guidelines and protocols for how to manage the process and assess the impact of our work.

This week the Regional Monitoring and Evaluation Manager for West Africa came and delivered training to Programme Office staff to support the APR process for 2013/14. As I was involved last year I will work with the Programme Office again this year; I am pleased about this as it means that there will be continuity, and I will get to see what partners have achieved since the last review. However, I am somewhat daunted by the level of work as I remember how much energy this process took last year!

The training was really really good. We learned a lot about the revised protocols for counting beneficiary numbers – something that I really needed to hear about as I had been tearing my hair out over it the week before. I mentioned in my last post that donors often want to hear about reach, but this doesn’t explain impact (you could work with ten people and make lasting change or work with 1000 people and not achieve much at all – but on face value 1000 people sounds better than 10). VSO have really tightened up the way we record these figures – taking a much more conservative approach, and making sure that we only count the people that we really have made a difference to. While this may mean a drop in our figures in the short term, it means that we will have a much better understanding of our impact, and what we are doing to improve the lives of poor and marginalised people.

The training gave us all a lot more confidence, and as we start the process next week I know that we will all go into it with a much clearer understanding. It reminded me of the power of training – even training in something that you have had experience in can really renew your interest and enthusiasm, and help you learn new or consolidate your old skills. Sometimes we worry that we are teaching people how to suck eggs, for example with the livelihoods project we are training farmers who have farmed all their lives. But we can always learn something new, and even if we don’t – good training is often one of the best ways to reinvigorate people and focus effort.