Thursday, May 23, 2013

Program Plan

Measuring Change has to begin from the Program Plan

To make Monitoring and Evaluation always a success, It all begins with the programming. The programme document is something so precious that if you simply threw it away you would be like a police officer firing blanks...No Effect! Programme planning is one of the most exciting moments for all program staff, beneficiaries and other stakeholders alike. If you are the person responsible for Monitoring and Evaluation in your organization, you must be completely involved in coming up with a program plan. Measuring change is your goal so don't care what others are going to say, just make it clear that you must, have to, want to participate in developing a program because that is your job anyway. It is important to realize the purpose of the program plan. Please note that the program plan is used to mean the same as a programme document. Lets just analyze why you should even care at all about formulating it.

Program Plan, Your Guide to better models

If you understand what a plan is very well, you will realize how vital it is to have program plan. Your goal is measuring change, creating a programme is all about you as an organization developing a set of activities with resources attached to them that will be seen to bring change in your beneficiaries over a specific period of time. So lets say that you want to reduce poverty, which is a far fetched goal but just for example's sake you intend to improve peoples lives by reducing poverty. Significantly, you introduce activities in the programme like educating people to take farming as a business. After their education, your farmers will become more knowledgable and will use that knowledge to produce more and thus more income and thus reduce their poverty. But how do you measure change whether there is any change at all? You have to run back to the program plan document because in it you find the variables you are looking for. Now here are a list of very important things that the program plan will communicate not only to you in Monitoring and Evaluation but also to others;

1. Achieved Results; The program plan will inform you as an organization what results you want to achieve. Once you have a document in your hands, the achieved results must be shown to the reader of how the world should be after the programme implementation ends. As a Monitoring and Evaluation person who intends to Monitor the programme, such information is highly important because you don't want to be reporting results that people are not even bothered to hear about.

2. Time Frame; Every programme has a time frame but why should this matter to you whose responsible for Monitoring and Evaluation in your organization? Well for starters it really matters because is allows you to significantly plan your own personal activities. It also gives you an idea within the time frame when you should schedule your monitorings of the programme.

3. The Type of Beneficiaries; The program plan must communicate inside the doument the kind of beneficiaries you are targetting. Why should this even bother to you, Well you want to tailor your data collecting tools to these kind of beneficiaries. You want your Monitoring tool to be as concise and user friendly as possible. Monitoring and Evaluation is such a fun exercise but can also be frustrating if you don't do things properly. Think about your fellow staff, your partners as well as your beneficiaries when coming up with Monitoring Tools.

Next time we will dive deeper into understanding what is actually involved in coming up with a program plan or programme document. In the meantime, enjoy the Monitoring and Evaluation experience.

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