Building capacity of project staff and partners on Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is a common role for Project M&E Officers. Yet many of M&E Officers never go beyond training, thereby missing the full benefits that capacity building offers a project team and M&E system. If your capacity building plan equates to training alone, the plan is not well conceived.

For project staff to succeed in the assigned roles, you need to support them get skills, knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. The four concepts collectively refer to a term we call competency. Think of a competency as an island. When you are by the lake, a piece of land is visible. The base that supports this ‘piece of land’ hides in water. This applies to our understanding of project staff competences. The “piece of land” visible are the “behaviors” we expect every project staff to show. The invisible part of the island is the “knowledge, skills and attitudes” that support a project staff to show the expected behaviors.

Competency-based M&E capacity building

A competency-based approach to M&E capacity building requires you identify the strengths, and the performance needs of project staff before training. In addition, you need to monitor progress of project staff toward the development of the desired skills, knowledge, and attitudes.

Below is an example of a competency for a project M&E Officer:

For detailed example of competencies, check out American Evaluation Association’s Evaluator competencies.

Implementing the competency-based approach to M&E capacity building takes four simple steps:

Step 1: Develop M&E competency profile for the project positions. The easiest way to develop a competency profile is to group project positions into categories. For examples, categories project staff into Managers, Specialists and Implementers.

A competency profile is a group of competencies identified for specific job categories. This method enables you to assess project staff to do similar roles on the same competencies. A project livelihood specialist, and Health Coordinator may both fall under the Project “Specialists” job categories. You will need to select the competency element of “ensuring the quality of performance monitoring” for these two positions, over “facilitating monitoring processes with partners and communities”. The latter is most suited for project implementers positions e.g., project community facilitator/officer.

Step 2: Conduct a competency assessment. The assessment may take 1 or 2 or all the following (based on purpose, budget and time):

• Behavior self-assessment: This requires every targeted project participant to reflect on they own skills, and grade themselves (i.e., on a scale of 1-5; 5 means high) against each identified element of the competency selected for their position. The benefit of this assessment is that it promotes individual self-reflection and responsibility for the individual’s development. However, you may need an expert or direct supervisor to validate or hold discussions with the individual on their assessment results.
• Knowledge, skills and attitudes assessment: This assessment focuses on the ‘head’ knowledge of the project staff for each selected competency. It provides useful data that you can use to inform curriculum for training project staff.

Step 3: Develop an M&E capacity building plan. This plan builds on the findings of the competency assessments. It proposes details of capacity gaps for the assessed staff, activities, and methods you will implement to strengthen competencies and expected outcomes. It is preferable to use blended learning approaches to provide alternatives to the project’s staff based on how they learn based or best way to build an identified competence.

For instance, the results of the competency assessment may show that some project participants scored high on a knowledge assessment (are knowledgeable). The same staff may have scored poorly on the behavior assessment (probably have limited experience). In this scenario, the M&E Officer may select hands-on learning opportunities for these project staff over classroom trainings.

Step 4: Implement the M&E capacity building plan.

Therefore, as you prepare the next M&E training for project staff or partners, be sure to have a good understanding of their competency gaps and match them to job roles and performance expectations. Remember, it is possible to have a different project staff contributing to the same project activity, such as a baseline survey. The Project Manager coordinates the preparation of Baseline Terms of Reference (ToR), Consultant hiring, among others. While the M&E Officer drafts the ToR, performs a quality review of baseline design and tools, training the enumerators with the Consultant, among others.

If you planned a baseline survey training targeting both the project managers and M&E Staff, ask yourself several questions. What are the training outcomes? Does the training content align with the skill-needs of all participants? Which specific competencies should I target in these participants? When you address these questions prior to every M&E training, you will not fulfill the capacity building role requirement: You will build M&E competency of project staff, enabling them to perform their roles effectively.

What is your experience with M&E capacity building? What approaches have you found helpful? I am happy to hear from you. Share your comment in the box below or send me an email at info@mandeboost.com.