Effective and sustainable management of the Gulf of Mottama requires work in many different areas – including agriculture, fisheries, livelihoods, infrastructure, and biodiversity. The Gulf of Mottama Project (GoMP) conducts diverse activities in these areas to help establish sustainable practices that benefit local people. It is highly important that we know how effective these activities are, so that we can make sure that we are working with communities in the best possible way.
Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is a way for projects to measure their performance. There are several different approaches to M&E. Our project does use “indicator based” M&E, which means we establish goals that can be measured by indicators – usually, these indicators are numerical or “quantitative” (such as number of participants, income, kilograms of agricultural or fisheries yield, etc.). So, at the beginning of the project, we determine which indicators we want to measure, and we establish goals for the numbers that we will see as a result of our project (e.g., how many people we want to have participated in training, how many patrols for illegal fishing we want local groups to conduct, etc.).
These are valuable, but they do not tell the whole story. For example, a goal for the GoMP is increased participation of women. When talking about women’s involvement in village decision-making, you can have an indicator for the number of women who attend meetings. So, you can show by the end of the project if the number of women participating in meetings has increased. However, this number does not tell you the details of how these women participate: are they active at the meetings? Are they listened to? Do they feel like they are able to make a difference at these meetings? It is also important to know why their participation changed – what did the project do that influenced or allowed women to participate more?
So, it is more useful to combine the quantitative indicators with more descriptive, “qualitative” explanations about the project’s impact. Qualitative explanations are also valuable because they can show whether the project has had unexpected outcomes (positive or negative) that would not be measured by pre-determined indicators.
The community members themselves are the ones who will provide us with this information – they will share their perceptions about our project’s work and effectiveness. To do this, they will work with us on a type of “Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation” called the Most Significant Change approach. Participatory M&E means that community members are actively involved in the M&E process. They help define what they want us to evaluate, and they share their experiences and insights with us to allow us to evaluate the project.
In Most Significant Change, community members will share with us their stories or narratives about their experiences with our project. The main questions will be related to what they think are the most significant changes to their lives (or to more specific areas, such as income, well-being, health, or whatever other topic they ask us to evaluate) that they have experienced as a result of our project. These changes can be good or bad (though we hope they will be good!).
Their stories will be reviewed by our project field teams and then the project’s technical officers, so we can learn from their feedback and assess if and how we need to change our project’s approaches. This way, the community member participants in Most Significant Change will be able to see that we have listened to their stories and that their perceptions are important to us.
To begin, we will be initiating the Most Significant Change process in two villages: Aung Kan Thar and Mi Lauk. This will be conducted by our Community Facilitators & Monitors, as well as collaborators from Point B Design + Training. We will start with working with communities to select participants who represent different sectors in the community, to make sure that diverse voices from the community are included. Then our field teams will collect Most Significant Change stories from these participants every 3 months. We are looking forward to learning more about how community members feel about the GoMP, and to seeing how we can keep adapting the project to make sure it is as beneficial as possible to these communities.