The Webinar was held on the 21st day of September, 2023 via Zoom by 10am. It was organized by Clones-House in partnership with the European Union/British Council. The topic of the webinar was “Tips for designing Monitoring Evaluation and Learning Plans”
The session was moderated by Mr. Jibril Suleiman. He welcomed participants and introduced the subject of the webinar. Miss Jan Knight, technical adviser on Gender and Social Inclusion working with the EUACT shared the programs and activities of the EUACT in strengthening the organizational capacity of CSOs across states in the country. She also talked about how they intend of having sustainability through the introduction of programs, materials such as manuals, webinars, toolkits and videos to assist CSOs across the nation build organizational capacity.
The webinar was facilitated by Mr. Oladotun Babayemi of Clones-House. He shared the different aspects of the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) plan. An M & E plan is a document that contains all Monitoring and Evaluation activities in course of project implementation.
Importance of M&E plan
1. it helps to assess that the project is achieving its set targets.
2. it is relevant to donors who need to assess whether the NGO is a reliable partner.
3. M & E exercise is a way to make the activities of the NGO transparent and easy to account for.
He also gave detailed insights on the “Contents of an M&E plan” which includes;
· Program Objective: it includes the inputs, activities, outputs and outcome statements defined in the theory of change, organized under domains of the theory of change, with questions and sub-questions of what will be monitored.
· Indicators: This include numeric and non-numeric indicators that were agreed on by key stakeholders at each level of the program objective.
· Data source: this column on the M & E plan describes the unit in which data is collected. This unit could be programs, participants, demography amongst participants, key experts, etc.
· Data collection method: this includes receiving data from through focus group discussions, observation, questionnaires and other instruments.
· Frequency: this refers to the time and period within the program implementation when you collect the data using the methodology and the unit of collection being described. Data collection can be at the beginning, middle and end of the program.
· Who collects data: it is important to have qualified and knowledgeable individuals responsible for collecting and analyzing data. Data can be collected by the staff of the organization or a third-party consultant or organization.
· M&E product: M&E products is a presentation and report of findings after Monitoring and Evaluation has been carried out. It can be presented in form of written reports (2 pager), short videos, blog posts or organizational website.
The facilitator, Mr. Babayemi Oladutun shared a practical example on how to work with indicators in relation to an M&E plan. He shared some resources with participants which can be used to develop indicators and M&E plan.
The webinar came to a close after a question-and-answer session.