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National Rural Employment Strategy in Lao PDR towards increasing opportunities for decent and productive employment in rural areas - Final evaluation

eval_number:

2770

eval_url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/eval/2770

lessons_learned:

themes:

theme:

Monitoring and evaluation

category:

Organizational issues

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comments:

Project and donor

challenges:

The project did not have M&E officer and it failed to set up a robust MEL and data management system. As a result, data collection was unguided and inconsequently the project suffered from poor data quality. Issues found included accuracy of data points and double counting. These affected data analysis to inform project impact on the ultimate beneficiaries. As there is no centralized and standardized database, it was not easy to even retrieve the project’s performance data. The data were not readily available, and the staff would only know progress only when they need to do report to donor. It is recommended that MEL should have a dynamic function for the Project and its stakeholders, MLSW, and the PAC and DACs. Introduction of the MEL system should be carried out as a process to engage Project Partners with the logframe. Stakeholders should be engaged and have some ownership of MEL system. The project should organize M&E and annual work plan meetings where stakeholders are engaged to develop M&E plan and annual work plan. Project logframe should be used to guide annual work planning.

success:

n/a

context:

The NRES project aimed to demonstrate effective working strategies, and to advocate/sensitize the government, constituents and development partners to use its approaches and modalities to promote rural employment in Lao PDR. Strong evidence of successes are required to develop strong business cases. Unfortunately, the project did not have a strong M&E and learning system in place. While the project does not have an M&E Officer who could help establish and maintain an MEL system and data management system, M&E and data collection training were not provided to field staff who was assigned to collect data. Data collection tools and definitions are not standardized across the two project provinces, the data from two project sites could not be aggregated. Apart from these, while the Project’s Development Objective (DO) requires the NRES to get implemented, the evaluation team viewed that there was no awareness among the project management and national stakeholders, with regard to implementation of the NRES. This indicates that that logframe should be reviewed at the beginning of the project to clarify the objectives, outputs and strategy with stakeholders and in order for them to develop a good M&E plan.

description:

A strong MEL system that generates technically adequate information is essential to proper project management. It is equally important that the project and the project partners review project logframe at the beginning of the project to clarify the objectives, outputs and strategy with stakeholders so that all stakeholders have clear and common understanding of what are to be achieved under the project.

administrative_issues:

M&E

url:

https://webapps.ilo.org/ievaldiscovery/lessons/230350

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location:

country:

Lao People's Democratic Republic

region:

Asia and the Pacific

---

eval_title:

National Rural Employment Strategy in Lao PDR towards increasing opportunities for decent and productive employment in rural areas - Final evaluation