RE: The farmer as a key participant of M&E: lessons and experiences from Participatory M&E systems | Eval Forward

Based on the  experience I had on implementing rural livelihood projects in international NGO, applying PME has its own advantages and limitation.

During impact evaluation, PME helped us to evaluate the project impact through how the developed resources/schemes could finally impacted on their life. One of our development scheme was developing a water source, hand dug well.  just to give you one example, The resource mapping helped us to well understand how the scheme helped them improved their life on comparing their previous experience by showing where they fetched water in the map and how far they traveled and tried also showing in picture how It was affecting women on different situation  like rape, harassment and abduction and the like. It helped us also to understand how the scheme improved social interaction and information sharing when people meet at the scheme  just by drawing pictures.

We used also the PME for planning purpose for project resource allocation and partnership. For instance We used resource mapping to get in-depth community perception and views on resource utilization and sharing  with in  and neighboring communities, when the resources are plenty and scarce, which resources are source of conflict and when. Institutional mapping also helped us to understand stakeholders’ engagement in the community and how it influence their livelihood. This information helped us to understand who works what and also to choose to whom we need to collaborate.

However, there was some limitation when conducting the PME. One of the basic challenge was to show how much  our finding are well represented due to accurate sampling was difficult. We had struggled to justify that the finding represented to all the community where the project implemented. On the other case, the discussion on some cases influenced by influential people in the community unless we made it controlled and managed discussion. On the other case, women participation were very low due to cultural influence.

Best regards

Mesfin