Objectives of PRMP

In 1993, the project was launched by the Vietnamese Government in order to improve income and food security of poor farm households by increasing crop and livestock production and improving the access of the poor to social and technical services. The major components of PRMP are credit, labour-based roads, irrigation, and support to agricultural extension, management of village development, and participatory processes of planning, implementation, and M&E. PRMP works through various line ministries, particularly the Departments of Agriculture and Rural Development, Animal Health, and Transport and Communication. PRMP co-operates closely with rural banks and is supervised and managed by a Project Management Unit (PMU) at provincial level and its branches at district level.

Ways in which PRMP has tried to achieve impact

To achieve their ambitious institutional objectives, PRMP has established a participatory planning and management capacity at the local level and promoted institutions to be client responsive. In particular,

• PRA has been institutionalised as a planning and evaluation tool, with teams composed of village representatives and commune extension workers,
• Village Development Boards have been formed in order to follow up PRA exercises and to plan and implement village development projects in a participatory manner,
• women’s saving and credit groups, farmers’ groups and water user groups have been formed and trained in bookkeeping, fund management, and technical matters,
• funds have been decentralised from the national to the provincial level, and responsibilities for planning and implementation been delegated from the provincial to lower administrative levels.

Under PRMP, apart from a massive extension effort, roads have been upgraded in various parts of the province improving the access of people to vital services (hospitals, schools, markets, etc.), irrigation schemes have been set up in a large number of villages boosting the production of rice and maize, and loans have been disbursed to self-help groups enabling them to invest in income generating activities.

Current monitoring and evaluation in PRMP

At present, M&E of PRMP is focused on project inputs, activities and outputs (number of training courses conducted, amount of fertiliser provided, etc.). At impact level,

• wealth ranking exercises are employed to identify changes in the income of target group households,
• the number and reasons of overdue loans are recorded in order to find out in time whether the project causes indebtedness of households, and
• improvements in food security are monitored by recording crop yields as well as the amount of staple food borrowed in the villages.

However, available impact data is not sufficiently disaggregated in view of gender, ethnic, village and household differences, and expressive indicators and simple tools to assess so-called ‘soft impacts’ (capacity building, gender relations, etc.) are lacking.

Methodology introduced to monitor project impact more closely

Since PRMP felt the need to improve the user-friendliness, cost-effectiveness and participatory character of their M&E procedures, Participatory Impact Monitoring (PIM)¹ seemed to be an appropriate methodology. PIM is the continuous observation, systematic documentation and critical reflection of project impact, followed by corrective action (plan adjustments, strategy changes). It is done by project staff and target groups, using self-generated survey results. The figure below shows the stepwise procedure of introducing and implementing PIM at the development agency level (e.g. NGO-based PIM).

Once an agreement on the objectives of PIM is reached among the stakeholders (funding agency, implementing agency, target groups), their expectations and fears regarding project impact are identified, e.g. in brainstorming sessions. The more participatory the project has been planned the more these views will overlap each other.

After the selection of impacts to be monitored, impact hypotheses are established in order to obtain a clearer picture of the project and the environment in which it acts. In impact diagrams, project activities / outputs that are supposed to lead to a certain impact can be arranged below, external factors above the impact in the centre of the diagram.

Having examined already existing M&E data regarding the selected impacts, the task is to develop indicator sheets which contain all important information for impact measurement: definitions of terms, indicators and their rationale, survey units and respondents, instructions for data collection, statements on limitations of the methods used.

To minimise the so-called ‘attribution problem’, the sample can include both project and non-project villages. Assuming that political, legal, agro-ecological and other framework conditions have been almost the same for both types of villages, any observed differences regarding selected impacts will be largely due to the (additional) project input.

Once questionnaires and other tools (e.g. PRA instruments) have been pre-tested, impact-related information and data is collected and processed. Interviews are held with randomly selected individuals (e.g. female farmers), key persons (e.g. village headmen, teachers) or groups (e.g. Saving and Credit Groups, Village Development Boards).

Joint reflection workshops with project staff, target group representatives and other stakeholders are conducted in order to (a) consolidate impact monitoring results by combining the views of various actors and (b) ensure that necessary plan adjustments and strategy changes are in line with the target groups’ demands and capacities.

Resource implications of PIM

On the side of funding agencies, the costs of introducing PIM (consultants’ fees, training workshop materials, follow-up assistance) amount to approximately US$ 15,000 per project. In the long run, these costs can be considerably reduced by training and employing local experts to act as facilitators and consultants. On the side of implementing agencies and target groups, the costs of running PIM can be minimised by

• integrating PIM activities smoothly into ongoing planning, extension and M&E activities (group meetings and minutes, book-keeping, progress reports, PRA exercises, annual evaluations, etc.),
• making a clean sweep of existing data cemeteries, substituting expressive impact related information for less action and decision oriented columns of figures, and
• being satisfied with fairly reliable statements on trends rather than insisting on (often just ostensible) statistical accuracy.

Value-added of PIM to PRMP

Since PIM has been introduced in PRMP only recently, it is too early for a final judgement of the benefits generated for the project and its stakeholders. However, preliminary assessments of PRMP staff based on their first experience as well as evaluations of earlier applications of PIM in other projects indicate that

• it provides an opportunity to reflect on the own work done and to draw valuable conclusions,
• it produces information which is not only relevant for project management but also for public relations,
• it improves the skills of those involved to observe, document, present and analyse, and
• it helps to further improve the interaction between project staff and target groups, ensuring that they keep sitting in one boat steering in the same direction.

- by Christian Berg, Berlin -

Selected publications and reports on participatory impact monitoring and assessment

Berg, Christian et al. (1998): NGO-Based Participatory Impact Monitoring of an Integrated Rural Development Project in Karnataka State, India. Berlin: SLE (Publication Series of the Centre of Advanced Training in Rural Development No. S180)

German Agro Action (1999): Impact Assessment of SCODP’s Food Security Project in West Kenya (author: Christian Berg). Bonn

¾ (2000): Ex-post Impact Study of PDA’s Community Forestry Project in Northeast Thailand (authors: Christian Berg and Viyouth Chamrusphant). Bonn

Germann, Dorsi; Gohl, Eberhard; Schwarz, Burkhard (1996): Participatory Impact Monitoring. Eschborn: GTZ / FAKT

IFAD (2000): Monitoring the Impact of the Participatory Resource Management Project (PRMP) in Tuyen Quang Province, Vietnam (author: Christian Berg). Rome

---

1/ PIM was originally developed by GTZ / FAKT in the early nineties to monitor the impact of grass-roots oriented NGO projects and later refined upon by the Centre for Advanced Training in Rural Development (SLE) / Berlin, in close cooperation with the Mysore Resettlement and Development Agency (MYRADA) / India and German Agro Action (DWHH) / Bonn. This was presumably the first time PIM has been introduced in a government project.