Participatory planning, monitoring and evaluation

 
Promoting inclusive local governance

 
KIT has thematic expertise in the fields of local economic development, basic service delivery (health, water, education), natural resource management, land governance, and participatory planning, monitoring and evaluation. It aims for the inclusion of marginalized groups in local governance to enhance equity of development outcomes.
 

Services and products

 
We work with central and local government institutions, non-governmental and civil society organizations and knowledge and research institutes. International partners include the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dutch embassies, Danida, GTZ, SDC, FAO, the World Bank, NGOs (ICCO, SNV, Cordaid). Specific services include:

• Policy advice and programme development at the request of national ministries, embassies and multilateral institutions in the fields of decentralization, governance, alignment and accountability, particularly with respect to macro-micro challenges in sector-wide approaches.
• Collaborative write-workshops to monitor, analyse and document good practice on the ground. The resulting publications (evidence-based papers, books, policy briefs) are used to inform practitioners and policymakers and promote debate through seminars.
• Learning trajectories through participatory action-research and workshop series to strengthen knowledge and capacities of a range of actors and to develop, test and evaluate tools and approaches that are used to facilitate local governance.
• Tailor-made training and short courses in The Netherlands and abroad to develop capacities of organizations which support decentralization and local governance processes. These include civil society, NGOs, local government associations, local capacity builders, representatives of central and local government, ministries and agencies. KIT further provides courses on health and governance. See: www.kit.nl/training.
• Facilitation of international networking to strengthen a knowledge base and community of practice by promoting sharing of experience and information, developing joint products and building alliances between professionals.

Decentralization changes the context of participation and local governance, and therefore also influences PM&E processes. KIT supports the exploration of new avenues for institutionalising PM&E and sustaining community level interventions, by strengthening functional relations between local government, communities and service providers.

KIT aims to strengthen capacities of local actors in the process of planning, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation, while ensuring the involvement of all actors with consideration of equity and gender. Specific support entails:

• Development of planning guidelines to enhance the preparation of realistic and feasible local development plans based on the national policies and local needs assessments.
• In the area of budgeting and implementation, KIT supports local governments in formulating resource mobilization strategies.
• Monitoring and evaluation is seen as a learning process between multiple stakeholders. KIT’s approach focuses on the development of effective participatory monitoring and evaluation tools that support joint decision making in basic service delivery.

One large programme KIT is involved in, is the World Bank African initiative on Community Driven Development. CDD is broadly defined as giving control of decisions and resources to community groups. It is based on the following approaches:

1. Empowering communities: communities can be organized quickly and productively to diagnose local problems, come up with solutions, lay down priorities, elaborate action plans and strengthen community organizations and accountability.
2. Empowering local governments: community empowerment needs to be embedded in an institutional framework of local governments; local government needs powers to levy taxes and user charges; local government development planning should be integrated, participatory, inclusive and based on the subsidiarity principle.
3. Improving accountability: the empowerment of communities and local governments will provide downward accountability to users of frontline services.

 
KIT projects
 

1. Community Driven Development: design of World Bank CDD projects (Sierra Leone, Gambia, Cameroon); support to World Bank CDD program in Burkina Faso and Guinea; CDD stocktaking and review toolkit development and training (Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mozambique).
2. Local government planning: Analysis of local government planning approaches (Benin), development of national local government planning guides (Mali, Guinea).
3. Local government budgeting and financial resource mobilization: Action research on possibilities for local financial resource mobilization based on NRM (Benin, Mali, Burkina Faso), publication on SNV West Africa experiences with support to local governments in financial resource mobilization.
4. Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation: Guidance paper which explores how a Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (PM&E) process can enhance participation, empowerment and governance in World Bank-supported projects and programs, and thus the performance, efficiency and sustainability of interventions.
5. Framework contract KIT-SNV 2006 for local governance/ decentralization activities: governance of investments in local infrastructure.