00:00:01 Introduction

Hi everyone. The first thing I would like to say actually is I was just talking to some colleagues that I'm really sorry. This is a webinar. I really wish we could all be in a room together and covering this topic because at the end of the day this is about participatory monitoring and evaluation. So I'm sure that hearing from you would also be extremely valuable in this discussion and because of that, I would really love for you to participate as much as possible, to share your questions and such, use the chat to share your experiences. That'll be very, very nice.

I'd also like to say this is a two-part webinar. So today we will be covering more on the theory—the theoretical part of participatory monitoring and evaluation, and the next time we would cover more practical aspects of it, especially with regards to integrating participation in the design of M&E systems. The next webinar is scheduled for April 23rd. So I'd also love to see you guys there.

This is the outline for today's discussion. We'll discuss a little bit what's participatory M&E. Then we'll have a moment of reflection on the politics of participation. Meaning, who is participating? Why are they participating? How are they participating, etc.? We also have a discussion about centering communities in this decision-making process in the M&E lifecycle. We also discuss some non-traditional methods or more participatory methods on how to engage communities and rights holders in M&E activities. We have a moment to quickly discuss protecting communities and staff throughout those discussions. And at the end, we will briefly touch on how can we make these participatory findings count, right? How to make them meaningful to our programs.

00:02:52 What is participatory M&E?

Who tracks progress and defines success in your programs? When we design programs, we often define success in advance. But success can look different depending on who you ask. So donors, for instance, they may focus more on strategic priorities or measurable outcomes. Implementing organizations may be more focused on operational feasibility. Other stakeholders, such as public authorities, may focus on policy alignment. But there's another perspective that is essential, which is the perspective from the people whose lives the program is meant to change. And participatory monitoring and evaluation help bring this perspective together, so that defining success becomes a shared process. The message here is not that one of these stakeholders is more important than the other, but they should all come together in this discussion to define success and what it should look like.

Participatory monitoring and evaluation refers to approaches where stakeholders, including the ones we just discussed—communities, partners, institutions, etc.—actively participate in tracking progress and learning from interventions. So, whereas conventional M&E might be more focused or might be led by external experts, participatory M&E is focused on involving all these different stakeholders. It involves them to define indicators to measure progress, to track results, to reflect on the learning, on the analysis, and on identifying corrective actions. So all these steps of the process are taken together.

Conventional M&E also is more focused on, let's say, more traditional methods of collecting data: surveys, technical tools, etc., where participatory monitoring tends to be more participatory, of course, in nature, and using mixed methods. In this scenario, monitoring becomes not just a technical activity led by a small group of people, but it's a shared learning process led by everyone, including the people who will see the results of those implemented programs.

In many conventional monitoring systems, communities are mainly involved as respondents. So they provide information through surveys, interviews, and consultations. Then those results, that information, that data is analyzed by evaluators, and then the results and reports are shared externally with different stakeholders. Participatory monitoring and evaluation takes a different approach. It involves the community members and rights holders as active participants throughout the process. This means that they can help in defining what success looks like, contribute to defining indicators to measuring progress, and participate in the analysis of results. In that way, monitoring becomes a collaborative process that reflects the perspectives and experiences of those most directly affected by the intervention.

00:06:38 The politics of participation

When we involve different stakeholders in a monitoring and evaluation process, this is mainly to ensure that more voices are heard. However, participation alone does not automatically guarantee meaningful engagement, and even within communities, not all voices are equally heard or equally influential. In practice, participatory processes can sometimes become more symbolic than substantive. One common challenge is when participation occurs late in the process. Communities may be invited to consultations after program goals, indicators, or definitions of success have already been decided. At that stage, the ability to influence the direction of the program is limited.

In other cases, participatory activities do take place—discussions, workshops, consultations—but the insights shared by communities do not actually influence the decisions. People contribute information, but they do not see how their perspectives shape the outcomes. When this happens, participation risks becoming more a procedural exercise than a meaningful process. This is why meaningful participation requires intentional design and continuous engagement throughout the monitoring cycle, not just at later moments of consultation.

When we refer to community participation, it's also important to remember that communities are not homogeneous. Different groups within a community may have different levels of influence, access to information, and ability to participate in decision-making processes. Social factors such as gender norms, disability, age, or economic status can shape whose voices are heard. If participatory processes are not carefully designed, they may unintentionally reinforce existing hierarchies rather than broadening participation. Without careful facilitation, participatory processes may amplify some voices and exclude others.

Because communities are so diverse, participatory monitoring processes also need to be designed thoughtfully. Participation plays an important role in ensuring that different groups have opportunities to contribute and that discussions do not become dominated by a small number of voices. They can do that, for instance, by creating safe spaces for marginalized voices. We also need to think about when we need to adapt methods for accessibility. We need to ensure that all members of communities, including those who have disabilities, are also able to participate in the processes. We also need to engage diverse community representatives, not only having community leaders, but leaders from different parts of the community. Women, LGBTQIA+ people, any other marginalized groups who are being influenced by these programs, they also should have a voice.

00:11:13 Centering communities in decision-making

Now we move to our next subject, which is specifically on how you're engaging these different stakeholders in the decision-making process, specifically on the M&E lifecycle. Centering communities in decision-making does not only happen at the end of the projects. Participatory M&E encourages engagement throughout the entire monitoring cycle, from the moment they are defining results, to reflecting on findings, to adapting actions.

Participatory monitoring and evaluation isn't only about collecting information from communities; it's about engaging those communities and rights holders throughout the monitoring and learning process. This includes defining the priorities, monitoring the progress and collecting information, interpreting results and the lessons learned, to finally adapting actions. When communities participate in these different stages, monitoring becomes a shared learning process rather than simply a technical reporting exercise.

Communities bring valuable contextual knowledge about local priorities and about realities. In a participatory monitoring approach, they can help to define, for instance, at the planning stage, identifying priorities and needs, defining what success looks like, selecting meaningful indicators, and validating program objectives. One way to do this is to have community workshops right during the planning stages to bring different members of the community together to help specifically cover these topics.

Participatory monitoring involves community members in helping to track progress. This may include collecting community-level data, documenting changes and observations, participating in feedback systems, and monitoring service delivery. We can engage communities in monitoring activities by basically training them to be the data collectors. We can have them document changes and observations in different ways, either through a timeline, or through maps, or by taking pictures of things they see as things that change in their communities. Monitoring service delivery is also something super useful, to have representatives in the community who are actually seeing if the hygiene kits are being delivered, if the educational kits actually reach the children, etc.

Participatory monitoring emphasizes collective reflection. We can engage them by reviewing monitoring findings. So once you have your findings, you can engage people from the community to review them and see if they're actually accurate, to discuss progress and challenges, to identify lessons learned, and interpret data based on local experience. Finally, one of the main goals of participatory M&E is to ensure that monitoring results also inform decisions. They can provide feedback on what's working, what needs adjustment, helping programs to adapt over time.

00:15:53 Participatory methods and approaches

Traditional monitoring methods often rely heavily on surveys or interviews where communities respond to questions designed by practitioners. Participatory approaches expand the toolbox by using methods that allow communities to express perspectives and to share findings and engage in learning in different ways.

The first ones are story-based and participatory prioritization methods. These methods allow communities to share experiences and identify priorities. Story-based approaches allow local communities to describe how change is experienced in their own words. Ranking and scoring exercises, such as Most Significant Change, can help groups collectively identify which outcomes matter most, or which challenges are most significant. These methods encourage discussion and shared reflection, rather than simply collecting individual responses.

Another set of methods are visual and creative monitoring approaches, which attempt to make monitoring more accessible and inclusive. They are particularly useful in participatory processes because they allow people to communicate experiences and perspectives in ways that go beyond written or verbal reporting. Participatory mapping, for instance, can help communities to document changes in resources and services or infrastructure. They can also make use of visual timelines or drawing timelines to help the participants to reflect on how things were before the project and how things are now. Another one is PhotoVoice, which enables participants to capture images representing their experience and use these images to stimulate discussion.

It's also important to reflect that these monitoring activities can also be led by the community members themselves. Rather than having external facilitators, we can always engage community members in those monitoring and evaluation processes. For instance, youth groups may document local changes or community committees can track service delivery. We can also have peer researchers or monitors, which involves taking members of the community and training and empowering them to conduct those monitoring activities. This allows us to have a different perspective on the data and access different places or community groups we otherwise might not have access to.

It's also, of course, very important to interpret those findings together. Participatory M&E involves collective reflection on data; it does not end at data collection. We need to involve communities in interpreting those results. We can do this through participatory data analysis workshops or community validation meetings. One method I really like is data walks. You have a room with different tables, and at each table, you have a different result that you think you achieved. You invite community members to come to the room and go from table to table sharing their opinion on each of those results.

00:22:42 Digital tools in participatory monitoring

In recent years, digital technologies have expanded the possibilities for participatory monitoring. Mobile data collection by community members is something that can take place through the use of technology. Digital storytelling and PhotoVoice are also related to using those digital tools. Mapping applications can allow communities to document changes, share experiences, and contribute this data more easily. All of these provide support for real-time feedback between communities and programs.

As with everything in life, technology offers many opportunities but also introduces challenges. As pros of using these digital tools, we can have broader participation across different locations. We have faster data collection and feedback; as we're collecting data, we can visualize those results. We have stronger documentation of community perspectives, having a database in place for storing all those inputs.

But there are also some cons. It can create a digital divide and lead to unequal access. Not everyone has access to technology, and even the people who have access may not be very familiar with them. We have to be mindful that technology should not replace dialogue; it should support dialogue. We also need to be mindful always of privacy and data protection concerns. If we're collecting the data, we need to ensure that it's stored in a platform, such as ActivityInfo, that is very safe and secure.

00:26:58 Case study: Girl-led monitoring

I would like to share with you a case study from my own personal life about participatory methods. I organized this activity called "Girls' Monitoring," which was focused on having girls, the participants of a project, try to be more engaged in monitoring activities. The projects I was working on were focused on empowering girls by building their financial skills, and activities were taking place online during the pandemic.

We started with a training session in which we trained them to actually conduct those monitoring activities. It was a very basic training: what is monitoring, how do we collect data, what is PhotoVoice, etc. This was important because we were building their capacity and empowering them to continue doing that after this exercise. Then we moved to the next step, which was the actual exercise. We engaged in a PhotoVoice exercise through mobile phones. The question was: "How has this project changed your life? Changed the lives of people around you? Changed your community?" They went around their communities taking pictures of things they thought answered that question.

After a while, we got back together online. We had the girls go online and share their pictures and tell the story behind the picture. After all the girls shared data, they got together in breakout rooms to discuss. They saw similar stories and discussed which were the most important results, identifying the Most Significant Change that this project was able to reach. We hired a video designer to get snips from our discussions and the pictures that they took and produce a nice video that we later shared with different stakeholders and donors. It was very meaningful because we were able to showcase how this project was meaningful to the participants.

00:35:01 Inclusion and safeguarding

Another challenge that we have when using participatory methods goes back to inclusion and safeguarding, ensuring that we are protecting communities and staff. Participatory processes integrate spaces where people can share experiences and perspectives, but it also requires careful attention to psychological safety and to expectations.

It's very important that we have safe spaces where participants feel safe to share their perspective. This can take place in a lot of different ways, but one way is to ensure that facilitators are not only sensitive towards what's being discussed, but are part of sometimes marginalized groups. For instance, once I had to conduct a study on people living with HIV, and we actively looked for facilitators who were part of that group to ensure that people felt confident and safe to share what they intended to share.

It's also very important to have safeguarding protocols in place. If we are discussing sensitive topics, we need to have protocols to ensure that we know what to do when a complex situation takes place. It's also very important to respect confidentiality and local dynamics, ensuring that we are engaging the groups in a way that's respectful to the dynamics of that place.

Something that is equally important is that you manage expectations. It's important to be transparent about the limits of this participation. At the end of the day, the community and rights holders are extremely important, but they are not the only stakeholders. We need to avoid false promises about program changes. We cannot engage and say, 'Everything that you tell us we will do,' because sometimes we cannot do it even if we want to.

We also need to support facilitators and field teams. Facilitators are often deeply engaged in participatory processes and carry the emotional weight of difficult conversations. Recognizing those challenges and providing support for staff is an important part of the responsibility. We can provide facilitation and safeguarding training, set clear participation boundaries, and create support systems and reflection spaces for staff.

00:40:13 Making participatory findings count

Participatory monitoring processes often generate rich insights, stories, reflections, and local interpretations of changes. However, when these findings move into institutional reporting systems, they're often condensed into indicators or summarized statistics. The challenge is to communicate findings upwards in ways that remain faithful to the perspectives shared by participants.

We can use those community insights to inform quantitative indicators or for triangulation. We can get those experiences and local interpretations to add more insights to those numbers, to put a story behind those numbers. We can also use those community insights to contextualize findings to help us understand how we got to those findings. And we can use participant quotes or narratives, especially for donor reporting, to ensure that all these findings stay reflected in our results.

Participatory monitoring and evaluation doesn't end with data collection or reporting. A key principle is closing the accountability loop—the participatory accountability loop—which basically means ensuring that monitoring results are shared back with people who contributed to the process. Communities get the opportunity to reflect on the findings and discuss what they mean in their context. These insights can then inform program decisions. And once the decisions are made, it's very important that they are communicated back to the community so they can see how their feedback contributed to program learning and improvement.

00:43:13 Key takeaways

The first takeaway is that participatory monitoring and evaluation is more than a set of tools or techniques; it is an approach of learning and accountability that involves different stakeholders throughout the entire monitoring and evaluation process. Meaningful participation does not happen automatically. Communities are not homogeneous, and participatory processes need to be designed carefully to ensure that different voices and perspectives are included.

Participatory methods can help create spaces for dialogue and reflection, and approaches such as storytelling, visual monitoring, or community-led monitoring can make monitoring more inclusive and grounded in lived experience. At the same time, participatory processes require attention to safeguarding, creating safe spaces, managing expectations, and recognizing the emotional costs of facilitation. Finally, participation should lead to accountability, which means ensuring that findings are communicated responsibly so that communities can reflect on the results and their feedback informs program decisions.

00:45:38 Q&A session

As we know, many projects are constrained by time. Doing a participatory approach sounds great, but it's also costly in time and funding. Is there a list of good practices that we can use for this model? And how to approach donors?

As we approach donors to make use of participatory M&E tools, we can also use that moment to convince them of the importance of participatory M&E. Participatory M&E allows us to gather inputs which we would not gather from traditional M&E tools, including reflections and stories from rights holders. When donors start funding activities, they want to see that the money is reaching the people it's supposed to reach and achieving the results it's supposed to achieve. The best people to tell that are the communities themselves. Engaging communities and inviting them into participatory discussions with donors is a meaningful way of showing that the investment is reaching the right people.

How to best leverage technology in contexts where literacy levels are low, specifically in Nigeria?

When literacy levels are low, you can use different methods to engage people. You can do PhotoVoice, having them take a picture of how the project impacted their lives. You can make use of other visuals. For planning, you can use mapping methods to help people understand where in the community change needs to take place, using GPS technology. For monitoring, you can use visual timelines to help people reflect on how things were before and after the project.

How can we integrate an M&E communication plan with participatory M&E?

You can use all those inputs that you're gathering from communities to get quotes that you can use in your reporting to help you put a story behind quantitative data. You can use these inputs to improve the quality of the results that you're sharing with external stakeholders. Also, going back to the accountability loop, after you have done the entire cycle, it's important that you share that back with participants, and that also feeds into the communication aspect of the project. They should get all the information that was collected, analyzed, and reflected on.

What is the best way to train community members to collect data without making the process feel like an unpaid job for them?

That question goes back to showing participants the value of those activities. What we're trying to do is not only use them as sources of information but to make them active participants of the project. It's not a paid job in the sense that they are also getting something from it, which is the knowledge and capacity building. But most importantly, making them realize that what they're sharing is going to be relevant for programming implementation and will impact the path to be followed—interventions which will directly affect their lives. It's important that they understand that what they're doing is ensuring that activities are relevant and significant for them.