Given Hapunda

6 Principles Guiding this Book In developing and shaping up this book, I have been guided by principles arising from participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E), whose usefulness has been observed in various studies across the world. In this section, I will discuss this principle briefly. Participatory monitoring and evaluation has taken over convention monitoring and evaluation for both country and organizational-led M&E systems, yet its principles are not widely applied in the systems currently available. For instance, in Zambia, M&E is coordinated by the M&E Division in the Ministry of National Development and Planning, through which other M&E departments/units of other ministries and stakeholders are included in the process (Ministry of National Development Planning, 2017). The National HIV.AIDS/STI/TB Council of Zambia also runs a multi-sectorial M&E system, which requires coordination of all players to the national response in order to lead to coordinated and expected outcomes. PM&E is a process through which stakeholders at various levels engage in monitoring or evaluating a particular project, programme or policy, share control over the content, the process and the results of M&E activity and engage in taking or identifying corrective actions (World Bank, 2010). At the center of this definition, is involvement of stakeholders. A stakeholder is anyone who is affected by or can influence the impact of a policy, programme or project. Service users, initiative beneficiaries, people living in a project catchment area, staff, volunteers, partner agencies, funding bodies, local and national policy makers or decision-makers are all stakeholders. These stakeholders are involved in varying degrees and direction in M&E processes depending on their interest and level of impact on them. Whatever the level of involvement, in PM&E, the aim is to move stakeholders from being passive to active ones (IFAD, 2002). For a project, involvement and engagement of stakeholders means deliberately involving and listening to stakeholders’ views at different levels of the policy, programme or project from inception to the end. For this to happen, staff must provide and communicate data that can help stakeholders to actively Focus Box 1: Types of Stakeholders Stakeholders are divided into two categories – primary and secondary stakeholders. We can also have tertiary stakeholder though. Primary stakeholders are those who are directly affected by the policy, programme or project. That is, those who are benefiting or adversely affected by the programme. Secondary stakeholders are those who have a stake or interest in the policy, programme or project, therefore, influence the direction of the policy, programme or project. Tertiary are those who are indirectly affected by the project. For example, borehole companies may be tertiary in a project that aims to improve water using community-led manual bore-hole drilling instead of automated bore-hole mechanisms.