III. EVALUATION METHODOLOGY
The review methodology was as follows:
A) A two day briefing session at UNCDF headquarters in New York, during which the team met and held discussions with senior UNCDF staff and UNDP staff. The discussions covered the following:
• review of UNDPs' concept of governance and its relationship to sustainable human development,
• review with senior UNCDF staff of the concept of local development funds,
• review with UNCDF staff of experiences and lessons from countries where local development funds programmes are currently being implemented,
• review of the terms of reference,
• review of field logistics.
B) Seven days field work in Uganda, five days desk work in Nairobi and eight days field work in Malawi, followed by nine days drafting of the report. The first draft was then presented by one member of the team at the UNCDF in-residence week, the first week in December.
C) Desk review of local development fund documents produced by UNCDF headquarters. These included, among others the 1995 Policy Paper, the 1996 Working Paper, local development fund design case studies at Malawi, Palestine, Uganda, Vietnam, Senegal, Tanzania, Cambodia and Bhutan. The Desk Review enabled the team to comment especially on the concept of local development funds and programme design issues.
D) Desk review of documentation produced by projects in Uganda and Malawi. These included project files and relevant officials such as decentralisation policy documents, sub-national development plans, such as district development plans, relevant donor country programmes, internal project evaluation documents and relevant consultancy reports. This enabled the team to acquire both project specific information and contextual information in Uganda and Malawi.
E) Discussions in Uganda and Malawi with central government officials, UNCDF personnel, UNDP personnel, other donors involved in similar programmes, and NGOs (see Annex). Typically these interviews/discussions would take between one and a half and two hours. The interviews were often open ended but most of the interviewees had received the mission's terms of reference in advance. They were, therefore, prepared to discuss the issues raised. These discussions were useful in providing the contextual information usually not included in written documentation but essential to the understanding of many of the critical politico-bureaucratic realities of project implementation.
F) Attendance at regular project implementation meetings, where these happened to coincide with the mission visit. The mission was able to attend a regular District Advisory Group meeting in Uganda during which the progress of local development fund implementation was reviewed and strategies for the next step explored. The mission found the discussion quite candid and informative.
(G) Field visits to a number of districts with local development funds projects in order to hold discussions with district officials and local development committees. In Uganda the team held discussions with the district team in Mukono District under the chairmanship of the Council Chairman. The mission also held discussions with a team of officials in Jinja District. In Malawi the team held discussions with the District Executive Committees of Dedza and Nsanje districts. The team also held project site discussions with one Area Development Committee in Dedza and one Area Development Committee in Nsanje.
These local meetings, both at the district and sub-district levels, were especially useful in providing project specific details of the practical issues of implementation which are usually lost in aggregated programme reports. In this respect, the mission regrets that there was inadequate time to visit more project sites and hold discussions at that level. However that, the field visits did yield enough information, in combination with that gathered through other means, to enable the mission to arrive at some conclusions about which it feels fairly confident.
(H) Daily review by the team of the day's interviews and related events in order to begin drawing tentative conclusions. Typically the team would review a day's events with reference to the quality of discussions and interviews, contextual issues such as the local or national politics of decentralisation, and of course what the day had yielded with reference to the mission's terms of reference. This process of daily review culminated in a one day review at the conclusion of the field visits during which the mission team agreed on the major and minor conclusions to be drawn from the field work. One of the minor conclusions drawn from the field work was that the mission would not use abbreviations and acronyms in this report, as these often result in obstruction of communication and offend the aesthetic sensibilities of both team members.
(I) At the end of field work the team briefed the UNDP Resident Representatives in Malawi and Uganda. This enabled the mission to present some of the tentative conclusions and get field reaction before committing itself to any final judgments.
The team feels confident of most of its general recommendations to UNCDF on overall program direction, possible implementation issues that will emerge in Local Development Fund projects, and potential ways to address these. For reasons of the extreme time constraints of the review, it feels somewhat less confident of having a comprehensive grip on the specific, field-derived details and ensuing recommendations for the two specific projects visited. We nonetheless feel that it is at field level that the truth of the Ugandan project staff's reference to the familiar adage, "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" will emerge. Consequently, it recommends further pursuit of the issues the team elicited as potential implementation constraints or issues, not at the project headquarters level but in the critical nexus of district and sub-district interactions.