Here at Feedback Labs we stress the importance of 3 simple questions: what do people want? Are we helping them get it? If not, what should we be doing differently? These questions lie at the heart of solid constituent feedback loops. But what do they mean for the practice of monitoring and evaluation? That was the topic of a frank conversation convened in May by the World Bank and Feedback Labs.

The term delivery has in fact often encompassed everything except responding to what people themselves say they actually want and need.

Keith Hansen, Vice President for Human Development at the World Bank, and Feedback Labs’s Executive Director Dennis Whittle sat down at RMES Together 2017 for a candid discussion of what an emphasis on serving people means for monitoring and evaluation.

Marie Gaarder, Manager for Human Development and Corporate Evaluations at the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, set the stage for the conversation, describing the emphasis on delivery in the World Bank’s current strategy. Monitoring and evaluation professionals have a key role to play in realizing the Bank’s strategic aspirations. How can we ask of the people we seek to help, are you being served?

It can be a tricky question, especially at a formidable institution like the World Bank. In the course of their discussion, Keith and Dennis recognized that in the past, monitoring and evaluation have often been about compliance, bureaucracy, and meeting output rather than outcome goals.

Dennis noted that, when he worked at the Bank, evaluators from the Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group were seen as performing autopsies on projects. Since the projects were already finished, the evaluations could not make them better. Instead of describing why a deceased patient died, he asked, “How could monitoring and evaluation make a living patient healthier and more productive?”

Read the source article at FeedbackLabs

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Megan Campbell helps to set the learning objects and agenda for Feedback Labs by helping determine the right questions to ask, and how we should ask them.