Improving the inpact of foreign aid
In the private and governmental sectors, inadequate macroeconomic theory and deficient due dilligence associated with the acquisition of financial instruments and derivatives has given rise to one of the most significant economic crises in living memory. A lower key crisis has been with us for a long time in the field of project performance in the areas of development aid and loans. Since this has only involved a proportion of the Euro100 billion spent on development each year, the scale of the current financial crisis acts as a diversion causing this to perhaps be considered as insignificant. However, this funding is often the only resource available to governments and agencies to help sectors and communities in low income and transition economies and it remains a professional ethical obligation of development practitioners to work to maximize its beneficial impacts.
A recent report by McNeill & Belko highlights the shortcomings of conventional monitoring & evaluation and the Log Frame Approach.
Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) and the Log Frame Approach (LFA)
The M&E and LFA approached to project oversight have ended up as a form of project management for increasingly complex projects. As a result, a large proportion of projects are failing to achieve objectives. The main problems associated with M&E & LFA are the following:
- M&E is an ex-post reporting system and does not provide timely support to project management's needs to react to changing circumstances
- LFA refers to a single project option and provides no support for decision-making when progress is not as anticipated
- Essentially each Log Frame is a tick list of what is expected as opposed to what is feasible according to changing circumstances
- The M&E system generates reports which provide inputs to decisions, which take place at some later date, to "resolve problems", causing essential decision and project events to move behind schedule resulting in "project drift".
- M&E + LFA are not flexible enough nor do they provide any guidance for decision-making as conditions surrounding a project change.
- M&E+LFA possess no mechanisms for supporting transparency or traceability of events/resources flow
- M&E + LFA possess no methodologies to ensure a practical support of sustainability in terms of flexibility and authorization of resource use within implementation and post-implementation stages
- M&E+LFA have no effective mechanisms nor do they provide any useful guidance for managing effectiveness and efficiency of:
- Optimised allocation of implementing agency resources
- Optimised allocation of project resources
This report has been promoted by the Development Intelligence Organization (DIO) and is part of the series A Boolean Society sponsored by The George Boole Fondation. In order to download and read this report click here
|
|
