Two major ills bedeviling M&E are corruption and pretense. Those willing to corrupt and be corrupted are too numerous to count in the development sector. At the same time M&E is like intimacy where the most celibate cardinal can pontificate about it - everyone knows something about M&E though no one knows everything about it.
It seems these days everyone is an M&E consultant. I’m not calling for the regulation of the noble profession but there is need to empower clients to identify bona fide experts and weed out pretenders. A bad job has the ultimate effect of engendering a bad reputation and consequently limiting the growth and advancement of the profession. A colleague once remarked that he had hardly seen an evaluation that was not contested. He pointed that there’s always something to criticize in an evaluation. It could be the comprehension of the scope of the assignment, the methods of data collection, the depth of analysis, the interpretation of results or even the presentation. Evaluation Associations, academic institutions and even clients has a role to play in building the capacity of evaluators. I say even clients - SNV a Dutch development organization had a capacity building program for their consultants (Local Capacity Builders they called them). At first I thought it an oxymoron but I appreciated the thinking behind it - everyone learns. More and more spaces for learning and sharing should be built. M&E is a fast evolving discipline those who have been long in the game may need to update themselves and the young and emerging evaluators need mentoring
Corruption is a cancer. Recently I put in a bid for an end of project evaluation for a faith-based Organization. To my surprise I was told I had not included a financial proposal among the documents I submitted. I rechecked my sent box. Sure thing, the Financial proposal was there! Well to cut a long story short I was not even shortlisted they had to safeguard the preferred! A couple of years ago I won a bid to do an evaluation for a big international NGO. As we were preparing to leave for field work the officer responsible approached me and said “We have not received our dues “. I was taken aback but soon realized it was the 10% gang. The network wove right to the top. My guess is as good as yours - the report took a lot of time and defending to be accepted if at all it was! A boss once pressured our M&E Unit to award a US$150k Impact Evaluation to “a reputable consultant” against our better judgement. It was not long before we discovered an intimate relationship between the boss and the consultant. We lived to regret the consultants’s expertise. I could go on and on recounting these horror stories but many have had these experiences. Development agencies pay lip service to the fight against corruption. It’s not only in M&E that corruption is endemic it’s almost in all spheres of development from procurement to program implementation. One thing to remember is a corrupt deal leads to poor service as the corrupter has a feeling of entitlement and the corrupted is insecure suffers impaired judgment
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