A couple of years ago I was facilitating a Managing for Results Workshop and I mentioned a phrase that my good friend Thembi liked so much that she has literally named me after it! The phrase was “Fugitive Indicators”. For you to grasp the concept quickly I will first refer to “Fugitive targets”. First, I will explain how Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) works. M&E is the discipline (art or science) of measuring commitments of good intentions to see whether they are being achieved. To do so you need the commitment i.e. a “Result statement” e.g. Goal: To Reduce Poverty in Zimbabwe by 2030 and then a measure for the result statement e.g. “Proportion of Zimbabweans Living below the Poverty Datum Line”. Now to convince yourself that you have done reduced poverty you need to know how many people are poor before you intervene (that called a baseline/benchmark etc) and also how many you can pull out of poverty (that’s your “Target”). Now lets say for illustration purpose you are “targeting” to reduce the number of people living below the poverty datum line from the current 30% to 20%, the role of the M&E practitioner is to measure that commitment.
Now back to Fugitive Indicators and Targets! I was reviewing a National Level Results Framework and I bumped into an Indicator that read “Number of gender-responsive measures in place for equitable access and benefit in sharing of natural resources and biodiversity.” I immediately though about Thembi! M&E practitioners may find several problems with how the Indicators is structured (google CLEAR, SMART Indicators etc) but what I’m interested in is the fugitiveness of the indicator and subsequent targets. Remember this is a national level indicator where several government and none government actors are contributing including private sector. All the actors will enact “measures” independent of each other and it’s not known how many measures will be enacted. This is where the ‘fugitiveness’ comes from. So if we set 10 Measures as our target. We might under or over perform on the indicator not because we are genius or dump but by a stroke of luck or fate! In every intervention we should have a measure of control over our intentions if we don’t then our targets are fugitive (elusive in some sense because they keep moving. It’s like we are chasing the wind!). In most programs/interventions resources often place a measure of control. It’s like we cannot achieve more than our resources can buy
Now back to Fugitive Indicators and Targets! I was reviewing a National Level Results Framework and I bumped into an Indicator that read “Number of gender-responsive measures in place for equitable access and benefit in sharing of natural resources and biodiversity.” I immediately though about Thembi! M&E practitioners may find several problems with how the Indicators is structured (google CLEAR, SMART Indicators etc) but what I’m interested in is the fugitiveness of the indicator and subsequent targets. Remember this is a national level indicator where several government and none government actors are contributing including private sector. All the actors will enact “measures” independent of each other and it’s not known how many measures will be enacted. This is where the ‘fugitiveness’ comes from. So if we set 10 Measures as our target. We might under or over perform on the indicator not because we are genius or dump but by a stroke of luck or fate! In every intervention we should have a measure of control over our intentions if we don’t then our targets are fugitive (elusive in some sense because they keep moving. It’s like we are chasing the wind!). In most programs/interventions resources often place a measure of control. It’s like we cannot achieve more than our resources can buy