PRA methods and their application to participatory monitoring and evaluation: report on a course held in El Obeid, Sudan

A two week course was held for government and NGO participants in El Obeid, Sudan, to "explore some of the issues around PM&E and introduce a selection of possible PRA methods". This report briefly describes the actual course and analyses certain problem areas that arose - attitude to villagers, use of symbols and the difficulty of focusing on PM&E within a PRA course. Tools found most useful for evaluation were: impact diagrams, impact matrices and evaluation matrices (visual examples of each are given). Participants were asked to give a personal evaluation of the course using symbols only.