Participation in Monitoring, The Roles of Stakeholders
 by
Phil Bartle, PhD

Training Handout.

All stake holders have a stake in knowing how well things are going

 Monitoring is a vital management and implementation role that
 cannot be left to only one stake holder. As many individuals and
 institutions as possible that have any interest in the project, at
 all levels, should participate in monitoring.

 As with community participation and participatory management,
 participation in monitoring does not happened spontaneously. The
 persons whom you want to participate must be encouraged and trained
 to participate.

Advantages of Participation:

 The advantages of participation in monitoring include: (a) a common
 undertaking, (b) enhancing accountability, (c) better decisions, (d)
 performance improvement, (e) improved design, and (f) more
 information.

 Common Understanding of Problems and Identification of Solutions:
 Participative monitoring helps stake holders to get a shared
 understanding of the problems facing the community or project (their
 causes, magnitude, effects and implications). This facilitates the
 identification of solutions. These solutions are more likely to be
 appropriate because they are derived from a current situation.

 Benefits the Target Groups and Enhances Accountability:
 Participation in monitoring ensures that the people to which the
 project was intended are the ones benefiting from it. It increases
 the awareness of people's rights, which elicits their participation
 in guarding against project resource misappropriation. Guarding
 against resource misappropriation makes project implementation less
 expensive.

 Making Appropriate Decisions: Monitoring provides information
 necessary in making management decisions. When many people
 participate in monitoring it means that they have participated in
 providing management information and contributed to decision making.
 The decisions from this are more likely to be acceptable and
 relevant to the majority of the population. This makes human and
 resource mobilization for project implementation easier.

 Performance Improvement During Monitoring, if a performance
 deviation is discovered solutions can be devised. To find
 appropriate decisions that can be implemented requires the
 participation of those people who will put the solution into
 practice. Therefore participation in monitoring can help improve
 project performance.

 Design of Projects: The information generated during project
 monitoring helps in re-designing projects in that locality to make
 them more acceptable. The lessons learned can also be used in the
 design of similar projects elsewhere.

 Collection of Information: If many people participate in
 monitoring they are more likely to come up with more accurate
 information. This is because, information that is omitted by one
 party, can be collected by the other. Each stake holder is putting
 varying emphasis on the different aspects of the project using
 different methods. Alternatively, one party knowing that the
 information they are collecting will be verified, forestalls
 deliberate wrong reporting.

Challenges of Participation in Monitoring:

 Whereas participation in monitoring has a number of virtues, it is
 likely to face a number of challenges. The challenges include: (a)
 high costs, (b) variations in information, and (c) inaccuracies.

 High Initial Costs: Participation in monitoring requires many
 resources (eg time, transport and performance-related
 allowances). It is a demanding process that can over-stretch
 volunteer spirit at community level and financial resources at
 district and national levels. Therefore it must be simple and
 focussed to vital elements.

 Quantity and Variety of Information: Monitoring requires
 collection, documentation and sharing of a wide range of
 information. This requires many skills that are lacking in the
 communities. It therefore necessitates much time and resources for
 capacity building. It also risks wrong reporting.

 Inaccuracy of Information: Some stake holders, from the community
 to the national level, may intentionally provide wrong information
 to depict better performance and outputs or because of community or
 project differences. To counteract wrong or incorrect reporting
 needs sensitisation and consensus building that is difficult to
 attain.

 The advantages of participation in monitoring are evidently more
 than the challenges. It is therefore necessary to encourage and
 support participatory monitoring as we devise means to counteract
 the challenges.

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Updated: 2003 May 8