Month: December 2009

Open Aid: Public Online Monitoring for Better Aid

A new website, launched in December 2009

What is Public Online Monitoring

Public Online Monitoring is an approach to bring development projects into the public realm. Public Online Monitoring improves access to project information and to facilitate communication among project stakeholders using an online platform.

OpenAid is a German NGO based in Hannover created in order to make Public Online Monitoring reality.

Public Online Monitoring has four key elements:

1) Detailed information about individual development projects, online, easy to find and easy to understand. This element is the realm of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), of the AidDATA project and of donors. OpenAid lobbies for more transparent aid information in German aid agencies.

2) Sector specific online guidance for civil society stakeholders on issues critical to monitoring (e.g. common sector specific forms of corruption).This guidance should support non-experts to ask critical questions and encourage stakeholders to monitor projects in their home area.

3) An online forum for stakeholders to meet, to exchange information, to voice concerns, to defend interests, to discuss policy. Such a forum can should involve local project management, donors, local government and politicians, local media representatives, local NGOs and citizens. It can also involve interested citizens from other countries, development experts and taxpayers in donor countries.

4) Linking up the online forum to people without access to the internet through an involvement of local radio stations and newspapers, creative use of mobile phones and through local NGO activities.

THE PITFALLS OF MONITORING & EVALUATION OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS, WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT, GENDER EQUALITY: DO CURRENT FRAMEWORKS REALLY SERVE US?

(From The Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID))

A summary of Part I “Capturing change in women’s realities: The challenges of monitoring and evaluating our work” a paper by Srilatha Batliwala* and Alexandra Pittman.** [Link yet to be found] PS:  Authors are currently inviting feedback and will publish a final version of this paper, together with additional research later this year.

By Kathambi Kinoti and Sanushka Mudaliar – AWID

Monitoring and evaluation now form an integral part of women’s rights and gender equality programmes as we attempt to measure how effectively we work. But are the frameworks we use able to perform this ambitious task?

In their paper Capturing change in women’s realities: The challenges of monitoring and evaluating our work Srilatha Batliwala and Alexandra Pittman assess the “ifs,” the “whys” and the “hows” of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) in women’s rights, women’s empowerment and gender equality. They observe that “over the past few decades, important strides have been made in developing ways of capturing a whole range of abstract but vital social realities, and particularly in trying to quantify them. These efforts have been the result of the realization that when policies, resources, and strategies are applied towards building more equitable, sustainable, rights-affirming, inclusive and peaceful societies, we have to devise ways of checking whether they are working effectively or not – whether they are producing the changes we wish to see.”
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Training: “Impact Oriented Project Planning and Monitoring”

Date: 8th to 10th of March, 2010
Venue: Karl Kübel Institute for Development Education – India

Dear Friends,

We would like to inform you about the above mentioned workshop which we offer at the Karl Kübel Institute for Development Education, Coimbatore (www.kkid.org).

Target group:

Participants from organisations dealing with projects and programmes of development cooperation in all fields being responsible or involved in activities of project cycle management. Knowledge of formalized planning procedures like logframe-planning and the use of project cycle management are appreciated.

Objectives: