Asia Regional Evaluation Summit: Building Monitoring and Evaluation Capacity in Local Governments

USAID’s Regional Development Mission for Asia (RDMA) and the United Nations Evaluation Development Group for Asia and the Pacific (UNEDAP) hosted the “Asia Regional Evaluation Summit” last week at the USAID Asia Regional Training Center in Bangkok.  Nearly 100 development professionals, representing 15 countries, from NGOs, universities, regional organizations, USAID and the UN, attended the Summit. 

The first presentation discusses the risks and opportunities in conducting socio-economic baseline surveys to measure changes in livelihoods with local governments, using baseline methodologies such as sampling, questionnaires, and focus group discussion.

The second presentation focuses on the development and practical application of the National Monitoring and Evaluation System (ProMIS) in the agriculture and rural development sector in Lao PDR. The sector wide approach in M&E within the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) calls for a functioning performance monitoring system that could measure progress and strengthen accountability. The ProMIS system, which is a data collecting system, allows for improving capacity of M&E units within the government and gradually leads to the capacity building of the corporate level managers to manage projects through better informed decision making.