|
Watersheds |
Process Monitoring |
Story
of Rabbit and Turtle.. Retold...
The story of rabbit and turtle is very
much relevant to development projects.
The fast running rabbit is comparable
to physical and financial targets, while the slow moving
turtle is compared to participatory processes. Though the
victory of the turtle in the story is a happy ending, in
reality this rarely happens. Importance of completing
"targets" in terms of physical and financial achievements
dominates the processes. The rabbit wins and the turtle
loses. The process based approaches are relegated as
unpractical and utopian.
Can process oriented projects achieve
so called targets? Can there be process targets, along with
physical and financial targets? Can large scale development
projects be process centric? How to integrate participatory
processes with large scale projects? Can the rabbit and
turtle walk together, hand in hand? How?
WASSAN is grappling with these questions, like many
development agencies. As a network based support
organization, WASSAN in engaged with large scale natural
resource development projects in India. The main aim is to
improve the "quality" of these projects. The association
with Andhra Pradesh Rural Livelihoods Project taught several
lessons to WASSAN in this agenda. In our long partnership
with the project, WASSAN concentrated mainly on
strengthening the participatory processes that are focused
on gender, equity and livelihoods concerns of poor men and
women in rural areas. Developing process guidelines,
building capacities for process integration in watershed
based livelihoods projects; supporting implementation of
process based projects at field level; action research;
studies on process specific themes and networking for
advocacy are some of the instruments in this agenda.
With
this background, WASSAN recognizes the importance of
"Process Monitoring" in keeping track of the projects - its
targets, financial, physical and process targets. Process
Monitoring offers an interesting opportunity to bind
financial & physical targets and process targets together'..
With the same objective,
WASSAN has taken up a project "Independent Process Monitoring of ARPLP".
with the support by DFID India. This project period is
from Oct 2005 to Dec 2007.
The
process monitoring under the project will be conducted
in four streams:
-
Process Monitoring of APRLP at field level
-
Processes Monitoring of Capacity Building Initiatives
-
Self Monitoring by communities at watershed level
-
Management Support to selected DWMA in institutionalizing
participatory monitoring systems of project
The first three months period is called "Inception Phase".
The proposed methodologies and tools for process monitoring
are tested during this phase. "Bench Marking of the APRLP
Processes" is also completed during this phase. For
improving these methodologies and tools, a national workshop
was organized on 7th and 8th Feb 2006. Activists and
representatives from resource organizations engaged in
monitoring of large scale developmental projects and
initiatives shared their experiences during this
workshop. The inputs and discussions are expected to enrich
the methodologies and experiences of this agenda.
(see
contents)
We sincerely thank the organizations, resource persons,
WASSAN network members, villagers and other supporters who
participated in the above process. We particularly thank all
our donors mainly Government of Andhra Pradesh, Government
of Orissa, Center for World Solidarity, HIVOS, ICCO, SDC IC,
DANIDA, ICEF, DFID India, IWMI, Water Conservation Mission,
NABARD, ILRI, AEI, Ford Foundation, WWF and others.
 Back
to top |
