Monitoring & Evaluation and Gender Issues: cross-cutting themes

A look across IRC's range of projects will reveal that two cross-cutting themes are evident: monitoring and evaluation, and gender issues.

For the Department of Water Development in Uganda, a community-based monitoring system for the Small Towns Water and Sanitation Projects was developed through a workshop. Issues, suitable indicators, and required actions were jointly identified by project staff and IRC, and advice was given on the requirements to ensure the effectiveness of the proposed system. Three valuable lessons came out of the workshop: with proper tools, monitoring can be planned at the lowest level; people must be strongly involved in the issues they plan to monitor; and monitoring should only be planned in phases, and not far in advance.

The latest developments in monitoring strategies and indicators were shared with others through a training workshop "Monitoring for Effectiveness" for the NGO Forum in Bangladesh and in a three-week short course at IRC with the same title. These activities, too, support a participatory approach, in which the users of the results are closely involved in the development of the system and the indicators. A key message emerging is that monitoring should support management and not be merely an information collection exercise.

Besides the gender components integrated into all of the projects in which IRC is involved in the field, the gender workshops in Mauritania and France mentioned previously enabled IRC to spread the gender message to an even wider audience. IRC also played a leading role in the Gender Issues Working Group of the Water and Sanitation Collaborative Council. In the Council's Global Forum in Manila, IRC staff gave an awareness quiz on gender and water in one of the plenary sessions.

Media Asia published the IRC article Bringing Gender into Development Theatre: Five Cases in India, which describes the importance of including gender messages in development theatre, and at the end of the year an updated version of the best-selling Technical Paper Participation of Women in Water Supply and Sanitation: Roles and Realities was on its way to the printer under the new title, Gender in Water Resources Management, Water Supply and Sanitation: roles and realities revisited.