Organisation and management
Monitoring and Evaluation
The PCU will monitor and evaluate performance and progress in project
implementation with respect to four main categories of indicators:
| a) |
indicators of the general production and
financial performance of the enterprises funded by the project;
|
| b) |
beneficiary tracking, with
particular attention to the participation of women, and women
head of HHs; |
c) |
incremental income obtained
by the participating farmers through cash crop production,
and of the impact of such income of the livelihood of the
HHs; and |
d) |
assessments of the quality
of the institutional development at farmers level, with respect
to the transparency of their operations and to the application
of democratic decision making processes. |
The production and financial performance of the
CPMCC and of NTC will be monitored by the Rwanda Development Bank
in accordance with the standard procedure applied to all of the
bank’s clients. Quarterly and annual reports on production,
purchase of raw materials, sales, prices, stocks, employment, etc.,
as well as financial statements, will be regularly produced by the
companies and submitted to the RDB. After review, such reports will
be transmitted to the PCU for further analysis and to IFAD. Annual
audit of the accounts of the companies will be contracted by the
PCU with approved external auditors, and their reports transmitted
to the RDB and IFAD.
With respect to the SMEs and the farmer associations
engaged in new cash crops development, the M&E office of the
PCU will recruit consultants to review their production and financial
performance on a regular basis. The surveys should be designed to
capture the problems of the enterprises, their chances of success
and causes of setbacks, their genuine need for project support,
the requests made for support, and the effectiveness of the service
providers, and of research institutes in providing the requested
support to their clients. The PCU M&E officer will report on
TWIN performance in providing several management services to the
CPMCC.
A special role in M&E will be played by TWIN.
On the operational side, TWIN, in cooperation with specialists of
OCIR-Thé and OCIR-Café, will certify the quality of
the coffee and tea produced by the companies supported by the project.
In addition, TWIN will also report on the performance of the general
manager of the NTC with respect to the contractual obligation to
associate primary societies leaders to the day-to-day conduct of
business. TWIN will also monitor the quality of the management of
the primary societies holding shares in the companies, with a view
to verify that the standards imposed by the FT network for their
partnership with the producers’ cooperatives (which are fully
shared by IFAD) are actually part and parcel of the modus operandi
of all organizations supported by the project.
The goal of the project being to help cash crop
producers in Rwanda to rise above poverty, the most important indicator
of project success will be the incremental net returns to family
labour obtained by tea, coffee and other cash and export crops producers
supported by the project, and the impact such increments have with
respect to the participating HHs getting over the threshold of poverty.
It will be important also to follow the improvement in the livelihood
of the HHs participating in the project. This is of course a more
complex matter which must be carefully examined to ensure that cost
effective methods are applied to collect the minimum of (quantitative
and/or qualitative) information sufficient to draw conclusions on
this point. The PCU M&E officer will contract ad hoc participatory
surveys to collect information about the behaviour of the indicators
over time, from a limited number of typical HHs. Starting in year
3, an annual summary report will be produced.
The project will institutionalise the practice
of stakeholders verification of the progress made in project implementation,
and of open debate on problems encountered in implementing the project
on behalf of the target group. To this end, the PCU will organise,
starting from the second year of the project, annual Participatory
Project Performance Evaluation Workshop. Four separate workshops
will be held each year: for the Nshili tea programme, for the smallholder
tea plantation expansion programme, for coffee diversification,
and for the new cash crop programme. These workshops will be designed
in such way so as to provide ample room for the rural households
to express their views on the performance of the service providers,
to make and debate suggestions for improvement, and to facilitate
the most participatory project implementation possible.
Funds are included in the Project Coordination component for designing
the M&E system during the first year of implementation. The
following chart shows the general concept and the main sources of
information of the M&E system.
Figure 2
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