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Participation has become a critical concept in development, increasingly employed in the planning and implementation of development programmes. This book takes participation one step further by exploring its use in the monitoring and evaluation of these programmes. Bringing together a broad range of case studies (12 in total) and discussions between practitioners, academics, donors and policy makers, the book explores conceptual, methodological, institutional and policy issues in participatory monitoring and evaluation. It distils the common themes and experiences in participatory monitoring and evaluation to show the challenges - and far-reaching benefits - of the approach. The book starts with a general overview of participatory monitoring and evaluation, followed by a synthesis of case studies and regional reviews of practice and methodological innovations around the globe in Part 1. Part 2 then presents case studies of learning with communities; these illustrate the diverse range of settings and contexts in which participatory monitoring and evaluation is being applied. Part 3 raises the key issues and challenges for participatory monitoring and evaluation, including the need for changing institutions. The book concludes by way of proposing areas for future research and action.

Using participatory approaches in impact evaluation means involving stakeholders, particularly the participants in a programme or those affected by a given policy, in specific aspects of the evaluation process.  The term covers a wide range of different types of participation and stakeholders can be involved in any stage of the impact evaluation process, including: its design, data collection, analysis, reporting and managing the study.

NGO-IDEAs is a cooperation of about 40 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from South Asia, East Africa and the Philippines, and 14 German NGOs working in the field of development cooperation.  Together they have been developing tools that are specifically relevant for civil society involved in community development in a wider sense. As a result they have produced the Impact Toolbox which is organised along the lines of the project cycle. 

The examples in this publication tell stories of how NGOs have applied elements of this tool box, with a view to giving people an idea of how the process works in practice.  Hence, rather than presenting the impact of NGO development work, they give a practical description of how the tools have been applied, and the difference they have made. They only report on parts of the practice relevant to this publication and also highlight errors and learnings.

In this WASH Talks video, Robert Chambers talks about the use of Rapid Action Learning (RAL) workshops, immersive research and participatory mapping methodologies in India with the purpose of checking what is actually happening on the ground, and learning from this, in relation to the national Swachh Bharat Mission (Gramin) (SBM-G) (clean India mission).

These methodologies have been developed and implemented with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC), WaterAid, Delhi University and the Indian government.

This Sanitation Learning Hub Learning Paper summarises the key learning from a rapid topic exploration on ‘Learning in the Sanitation and Hygiene Sector’.

The study looked at how people in the WASH sector learn, the processes utilised and what works best, as well as the barriers and challenges to learning. It looks at learning from communities and peer-to-peer and how the learning gets translated into action at scale.

This paper shares the lessons from sector and associated actors working in low- and middle-income contexts around the world and makes recommendation on how to strengthen learning and sharing processes, as well as building capacities and confidence for learning, with the ultimate aim of turning that learning into action at scale. A shorter learning brief accompanies this paper.

This paper explores the idea of learning from failure in the sanitation sector. The recent trend of ‘admitting failure’ in aid and development forces sanitation practitioners, researchers and policymakers to ask if we can and should address failure more openly in order to improve our work.

The ideas in this paper developed from discussions at a workshop on ‘learning from failure’ convened by the UK Sanitation Community of Practice (SanCoP) designed to kickstart this debate. We first discuss the concept of failure itself and identify different approaches to learning from failure relating to sanitation.

These include acknowledging past failures in order to learn and adapt, and planning for ‘safe’ future failures through deliberate experimentation and innovation. We also argue that a series of further steps are required: understanding relevant previous approaches to learning from failure in the sector; recognising different types of failure; seeking different actors’ perspectives on failure; and framing the debate about failure constructively rather than negatively.

In the second part of the paper we examine different practical examples of how actors in the sanitation sector have tried to learn from failure, to assess how this happened and what changes resulted. In the final section of the paper we conclude with suggestions for how individuals and organisations working in sanitation and international development more widely can learn from failure. We also propose SanCoP itself as one example of a ‘safe space’ in which people can meet to discuss and learn from failure.