RBM Learning Module 2 - Community Contextualization - Draft 8
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A self-directed PPT presentation that suggests ways in which you can translate and apply the key concepts of Results-Based Management at the community level. Developed for Southern NGOs and local community leaders, but also of interest to Northern NGO staff who work with them.
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RBM Learning Module 2 - Community Contextualization - Draft 8
- 1. In Our Own Words A tool kit of participatory approaches for using RBM with a community By Will Postma & Dwayne Hodgson
- 2. Welcome! This toolkit suggests some participatory methods to adapt Results-Based Management approaches so that communities can participate in planning, measuring and reporting the results of their projects.
- 3. Before we begin… Let’s recall that: “Results-Based Management” or “RBM” is an approach to organizing and explaining your community’s dreams… and how best to get there. RBM can sometimes seem quite complicated and intimidating….
- 5. RBM = Answering 6 Questions What do we ultimately want to improve in our community? How will we make that happen? What do we need to do in the short and medium term? What problems might we encounter as we go forward? How will we know if we are successful? How will we make changes that may be seen as necessary? How will we share the story of our project?
- 6. RBM works best when there is a high level of community participation because: Input, ownership & accountability It honours the principal stakeholders Good information, local knowledge, customs, power dynamics, etc. Monitoring and evaluation easier and more meaningful. No successful project implementation is possible in our environment without an understanding of the culture of the people… We need to refine results tools so as to adopt a bottom – up approach especially when doing project at community levels. Peter Ujomu, Nigeria Quoted in RBM Are We There Yet….Ever?
- 7. Participatory Monitoring & Evaluation Cycle
- 8. 2. Tools for Using RBM in the Community Translate Key Terms Use Local Metaphors Problem Solution Tree Appreciative Inquiry PRA Tools Different Ways of Knowing
- 9. A. Translate Key Terms
- 10. Splash & Ripple Activity Output Immediate Outcome Intermediate Outcome Ultimate Outcome
- 11. B. Use Local Metaphors RBM Outputs Immediate Outcomes Intermediate Outcomes Ultimate Outcome Football Kicks made Passes completed Goals Win the Game Win Tournament Cricket Runs scored Batters out Overs, Runs Win the Game Win the Test Match Farming Plants Grow Plants Bear Fruit Farmer Has Food Plants planted Weeds pulled Fields watered. Getting in Shape Diet followed Exercise program completed Lose Weight, Stronger Muscles, Better Health Live longer
- 12. Results can grow over time, each building on another and increasing benefits to more and more people Ultimate Outcome Intermediate Outcomes Immediate Outcomes Outputs Time
- 13. The Results Chain as a River…. Ultimate Intermediate Outcomes Immediate Outcomes Outputs
- 14. Or like paths when climbing a mountain….. Ultimate Outcome! Intermediate Intermediate Immediate Immediate Immediate Output Output Output Output Output
- 15. C. Problem Solution Tree
- 16. Problem Solution Tree
- 17. Solution Tree Results Chain Ultimate Outcome Intermediate Outcome Immediate Outcome Outputs
- 18. Solution Tree Results Chain Ultimate Outcome Intermediate Outcome Immediate Outcome Outputs
- 22. E. Other PRA Tools Participatory Rural Appraisal Participatory Learning and Action Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation
- 23. A group mapping tool. Using drawing materials, invite groups of 5-7 participants to draw a map of their community that illustrates key features. Ask them to share their maps and compare perspectives. Useful for baseline assessment, but also to identify problems and solutions, and for monitoring progress via before and after maps. Community Mapping
- 25. where people gather,
- 26. local institutions (e.g. schools, or religious sites). Draw a diagram that illustrates this cross-section ; add notes as helpful.
- 27. Seasonal Calendar Using paper and pens, create a common calendar that outlines the months and/or seasons. Invite the participants to mark significant dates (e.g. holidays), events (e.g. planting, harvesting, school dates) and changes in income, work levels, food supply, etc.
- 28. Road Journeys Ultimate Outcome Intermediate Outcomes Outputs Activity Immediate Outcomes Risks Baseline
- 29. Diamonds Higher than average Average level of income Less than average
- 30. Circles Women’s loan circles Village Council Youth groups National govt. reps
- 32. More comfort with oral traditions and story-telling than reports and numbers
- 35. 2. Tell Stories Story telling is an integral part of many cultures, Collect and celebrate people’s stories Be aware of bias and use good qualitative methods to analyze common themes and innovative perspectives. Consider using the Most Significant Change method
- 36. 3. Drama History, analysis, dynamics, and envision possibilities Before and after: act out a short play that illustrates a problem. Ask the audience to name ways they could resolve this and/or act them out. Record ideas of ways to create change and describe it.
- 37. 4. Music Invite the participants to create and share songs that tell the story of the community before the project and afterwards
- 38. 5. Kinesthetic Methods Increased knowledge about maintaining the irrigation facilities. Increased ability of community members to interact with and gain new knowledge from water engineers. Improved health of children. Increased availability of fish. Functioning water retention dam and irrigation scheme. Increased income. Increased consumption of food and protein by children, women and men 2 5 7 3 1 4 6
- 39. Or, to show it differently…. 1 Functioning water retention dam and irrigation scheme. 2 Increased knowledge about maintaining the irrigation facilities. 3 Increased availability of fish. 4 Increased income. 5 Increased ability of community members to interact with and gain new knowledge from water engineers. 6 Increased consumption of food and protein by children, women and men 7 Improved health of children.
- 40. G. Other suggestionsStepping down the complexity of the logframeStepping into the community so that community members can more fully participate and Stepping the community contributions back up again so that donors can appreciate the work done at community level
- 41. Ladder of Participation 5. Ownership / empowerment 4. Active participation 3. Willingness to share 2. Consultative 1. Passive
- 42. Stakeholder Engagement 5. Community members feel that a growing sense of high and mutual benefit with stakeholders 4. Other stakeholders actively seek out community / community committee so as to engage with them 3. Community has plan by which to engage stakeholders 2. Stakeholder Interests Understood 1. Stakeholders Identified (Stakeholder Mapping)
- 43. Risk Management 5. Community members feel a growing capacity to respond to risk in effective ways 4. Community has put a number of risk management strategies in place 3. Community has a Plan in place to manage and respond to risks 2. Risks Understood by Community 1. Risks Identified
- 44. Story Telling 5. Most community members are very satisfied with the project 4. Most community members are satisfied while some are very satisfied with the project 3. Most community members are satisfied with the project 2. Some community members are satisfied with the project 1. Few community members are satisfied with the project
- 45. Other Toolboxes
- 47. What would you add? This presentation summarizes some of the tools and toolboxes that we’ve come across so far. But we are interested in hearing what you would add to this resource. What tools and approaches have you used in the community to support an RBM process?.....
- 48. Please contact us @... Will Postma wpostma@savethechildren.ca www.savethechildren.ca Dwayne Hodgson dwayne.hodgson@yahoo.ca www.learningcycle.ca
Editor's Notes
- Welcome to “In Our Own Words”: a toolkit of participatory approaches for using RBM with a community.
- This toolkit suggests some participatory methods to adapt Results-Based Management approaches so that communities can participate in planning, measuring and reporting the results of their projects. It is intended for community participants, CBO and NGO development practitioners.
- “Results-Based Management” or “RBM” is an approach to organizing and explaining your community’s dreams and ideas. RBM approaches can sometimes seem quite complicated and intimidating….
- But Results Based Management really just encourages you to ask and respond to 6 questions:What do we ultimately want to improve in our community? (impact)How will we make that happen? (activities & short/medium term results)What problems might we encounter as we go ? (risks, prevent and fix)How will we know where we are successful? (monitoring plan)?How will we change our strategy as we go? How will we share the story of our project?
- RBM works best when there is a high level of participation by all stakeholders, especially the local community members. Experience has shown that local community members should be involved in all phases of a project, from needs assessment to evaluation because it: Honours the fact that community members are the principal stakeholders in their project with the most at stake.Ensures their input into and ownership of the project design and accountability to achieve results.Ensures that project is based on good information, especially local knowledge, customs, power dynamics, etc.Makes monitoring and evaluation easier and more meaningful.
- Participation should be built into all phases of the project cycle. The Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation Cycle can be broken down into 7 steps:Introduction: Review what has already been done in the community for monitoring and evaluation and introduce the reasons and concepts of PM&E.Stakeholder Analysis: Identify the information needs of each stakeholder group, and the training needs they may have for PM&E.Clarify the objectives and results of the project that you want to monitor.Provide training in participatory monitoring and evaluation so that everyone has a common language, framework and set of tools to work with. This process will provide you with ideas on how to refine the M&E process. Determine the results you will monitor, the indicators you’ll use to monitor those results and the PM&E tools you’ll use to collect and analyze data about the indicators. Collect and analyze the information through field work and immersion. Be sure to triangulate the information by checking with several sources. Provide feedback to the community, its leaders and other project stakeholders. Reflect both on the results and the process of PM&E so you can improve the process next time.
- The next slides present some ideas for how you can adapt RBM approaches to work with local communities in the South.
- Some of the terms used in RBM can be challenging even for native-English speakers, but they can be even more so for people who speak another language. For example, in Swahili there is only one word, “matakeo” for “result”, “output”, “outcome” and “impact”.Thus, in facilitating workshops on RBM, it can be helpful to acknowledge this challenge and to invite the participants to create their own explanations of these and other terms. For example, when the participants in a Tanzanian RBM workshop heard an explanation of the terms and were invited to do their own translation, they came up with “result”, “first result”, “second result” and “third result”. Using local terms as much as possible can help
- Another widely used metaphor that better conveys the causal links between the three levels of Results is the Splash & Ripple image in which a person drops the rock (inputs) into a pond creating a splash (outputs) and then ripples (outcomes and impacts). The participants in a community training session can even try this out using a bowl of water and a stone! This metaphor can be extended further to discuss issues of diminishing control over subsequent results once you’ve let go of the rock, widening spheres of influence as the ripples spread, diminishing attribution as the amplitude of the waves diminishes, etc.(PLAN:NET 2003).
- Another technique to make sense of a results chain to substitute the technical terms with a locally appropriate metaphor that illustrates changes over time and the cause-and-effect relationship between activities and results. This table illustrates a few possible metaphors. But think of what might work best locally. These metaphors can be expanded to describe other RBM concepts. For example, using the Football image, you might describe “indicators” as the statistics collected during the game (e.g. number of yards run, completed passes) or describe risk analysis in terms of yellow and red cards.
- Another metaphor that might work is to consider a river and its tributaries in which the small creeks are the outputs, the streams are the outcomes and the river is the impact.
- Or you might want to use the image of a mountain in which the top is the Impact. On the way are different stops, like the outputs and outcomes – each closer and closer to the top of the mountain. As we get closer to the top, with less and less oxygen in the air, the climb can be more and more difficult.
- Problem trees are a great tool for helping a community analyze their own development challenges that a community faces. In a workshop, the participants draw a Problem Tree by naming a presenting problem (the trunk of the tree) and then “drilling down” to name its underlying causes and the root causes of those problems. In this example, they started with the problem of “Not enough food” and then named its causes as “pest eat our harvest” and “insufficient harvests”. They then worked down to identify two more levels of “root causes”. Please note, we recommend that you stop at four levels of problems in order to keep the process manageable.
- .Having identified the problem tree, the next step is to change each problem statement into its opposite condition. For example, starting at the top, “Not enough food” becomes “Enough food”, and “Pests eat harvest” becomes “pests don’t eat harvest”, etc. Keep working down the charge until you get to the final, bottom row. For this level, name specific actions that the community and its partners might undertake to address the bottom row or problems. These are often more manageable problems for the community to address.
- One nice thing about using a problem to solution tree is that you the four levels of solutions should provide the first draft of a results-chain in an RBM planning framework or Logical Framework Analysis. The Outputs (completed activities or products of the activities), should link causally up the tree to the other solutions at the Immediate, Intermediate and Ultimate Outcome levels. Of course, you will need to check the logic of these connections and conduct an assumptions and risk analysis to refine it further.
- And as you can see, the Logic Model table fits very neatly over the four rows of results statements!
- Some find focusing on problems to be disempowering for community groups. Another option is to use an Appreciative Inquiry (AI) approach to help a group get “unstuck” by identifying and celebrating what has gone well in the past and build a positive vision of the future. The steps of an AI process are:Discover: “What has worked well in the community in the past? What are the cultural, social, political, physical, and/or economic assets that the community has to work with? Dream: “What would you like your community to be like in 10 years? Summarize this in a story or picture. Design “What are the actions that you could do together to move you towards that dream? What stepping stones would indicate that you are getting there? Delivery – “How will we plan out the project and track our progress towards our dream? Record the community members answers in words, pictures or oral stories. Compare different ideas and work on building a consensus.
- Participatory rural appraisal (PRA) is growing toolbox of participatory approaches and methods that emphasize local knowledge and enable local people to make their own appraisal, analysis, and plans. PRA uses group animation and exercises to facilitate information sharing, analysis, and action among stakeholders. Although originally developed for use in rural areas, PRA has been employed successfully in a variety of settings.Many of these approaches can be used in conjunction with an RBM approach. The next slides describe a few of these tools.
- Community mapping is a group mapping tool that invites the participants to draw a picture of their community and its key geographic, social and cultural features. It can be used in the community assessment process, as well as to collect baseline information. The community may want to repeat the process again later on during the project as part of their own monitoring and evaluation work.
- Road journey diagrams chart the progress of a community or project as “a journey from point A to point B” over time. Forward-looking journeys can be drawn by the community at the start of a project as ‘strategic plans’ against which actual changes are assessed at a future date. They can map out: the ultimate outcomeof a project the starting point (baseline) the intermediate destinations along the way (intermediate results like outputs and outcomes) the steps they’ll take to get there (activities) the expected obstacles and challenges (risks and assumptions) Later on in the project, the community members can check their actual progress vs. this map by correcting it or drawing a new map of what actually happened and comparing it to their pre-project map. For more information, please see: http://www.lindaswebs.org.uk/Page3_Orglearning/PALS/PALS_Docs/PALS_ RoadJourneys_Draft2005.doc
- Diamonds are used to investigate extent and criteria of social differentiation within communities and/or groups. For example, a group of participants could draw a diamond that describes who has which levels of income in the community. They’d start by identifying where the majority of a population are as the middle of a diamond and use numbers, symbols and pictures to describe their income, assets, challenges and opportunities that this group has. They’d then do the same for the extremes of the diagram– both higher than average and lower than average –along with the reasons and criteria used.Diamonds are a useful means of taking clear field notes on criteria for differentiation and rough numbers of people at different levels. They can be revisited at particular intervals to see whether the qualitative analysis or quantification of the numbers of people at each level, or criteria are still the same (e.g. have the numbers of very poor people, or very vulnerable women, or serious cases of alcoholism declined? Has the nature of poverty or empowerment changed?).For more information see, http://www.lindaswebs.org.uk/Page3_Orglearning/PALS/PALS_Docs/PALS_Diamonds_2005Draft.doc
- Circle diagrams show the relationships between different elements or institutions represented as overlapping circles of different sizes, colours and lines. Each of the circles denotes a different community group (by gender, religion, politics, age, etc.) or institution. They are drawn on the map according to their relative size, importance and/or power, and their relationship to each other. Groups with overlapping membership can be drawn with overlapping circles. The participants can add in pictures, symbols, numbers and words that describe other characteristics of the groups. Circle diagrams can raise awareness about power structures within communities, markets and other institutions: which are the powerful institutions, who is in and who is excluded. They are also good for bringing together detailed information about institutions and for identifying decision-makers and duty bearers who need to be influenced for a project to succeed. In a monitoring and evaluation context, circle diagrams can be revisited at particular intervals to see whether the memberships and structures of different groups, or decision-makers have changed or whether they are fulfilling their duties and responsibilities. For more information, see: http://www.lindaswebs.org.uk/Page3_Orglearning/PALS/PALS_Docs/PALS_Circles_2005Draft.dochttp://www.lindaswebs.org.uk/Page3_Orglearning/PALS/PALS_Docs/PALS_Circles_2005Draft.doc
- RBM is fundamentally supposed to be about learning and change. But because of its roots, it tends to be text-based and it can favour quantitative analysis. When using RBM in a community setting, however, you may find it helpful to keep in mind that there usually very different levels of literacy amongst the group, as well as the fact that we all learn and express ourselves through a variety of styles. Here are a few suggestions on how to adapt an RBM process to different learning styles and domains.
- To accommodate less literate community members and to reinforce spoken words and text with visuals, try to use pictures, photos, symbols, and drawings to illustrate concepts and to represent indicators.For example, in this example from <place>, the participant drew a glass of water where the level of the water indicated the degree of change they saw.You could also provide a basic camera to the community members to take photos of the progress of their project.
- In this example, the participants drew a picture of a tree to show the changes in organizational growth.
- Story telling is an integral part of many cultures around the world, and a technique of data collection that is low-cost and accessible to everyone regardless of their level of literacy. In a community based process, people’s stories can offer a rich illustration of the dynamics and history of a community, as well as an indication of the situation that exists before, during and after the project. To collect these stories, consider having someone write them down or if possible, make an audio recording. Be ware, however, that stories may only convey that person’s perspective and you’ll need to check if that story is typical or representative of the experience of others in the community. You can then conduct content analysis to discern repeating themes and innovative ideas (“positive deviants”). There is also a qualitative method of Monitoring and Evaluation called “Most Significant Change” that invites community participants to share and record their stories about what they see as the most
- Using drama or inviting the participants to create a short play and act it out can be another, culturally-appropriate means of hearing the story of what has happened in the community before, how they understand their problems, illustrating community dynamics, and creating an image the present and desired future. For example, you might ask a group of youth to illustrate the current problems with HIV/AIDS in their community in a short play (baseline). The audience could then be asked to analyze the play and suggest ways that these problems might be addressed (activities). The actors could then act out a situation in the future in which the problem of HIV/AIDS was being addressed (results), and the audience could suggest indicators that would let them know the problem had been addressed.You can capture the key ideas in a short summary, or you may want to actually make a short video of the actual presentation.
- Music is a universal language. Invite the community participants to come up with songs that describe their current situation and what the results they want to achieve. Or you may want to ask them to create a song that illustrates the story of the community project.
- There are many other monitoring and evaluation toolboxes available that can enhance and supplement an RBM approach.These include: Most Significant Change Participatory Impact Pathways Analysis Outcome Mapping
- This draft presentation summarizes some of the tools and toolboxes that we’ve come across so far. But we are interested in hearing what you would add to this resource.What tools and approaches have you used in the community to support an RBM process?Please write us @ wpostma@savethechildren.ca and dwayne.hodgson@yahoo.ca with your ideas.