Monitoring and Evaluation support to the Chia se Poverty Alleviation Program Phase II
Chia se can be described as a pre-reform program aiming at showing a way to implement the decentralization policies of the Government of Vietnam Nation-wide, analyze the results obtained and communicate lessons learned to the public administration nation-wide. The Chia sẻ approach to poverty alleviation can be briefly described as a way of empowering villagers to jointly manage a Local Development Fund (LDF), large enough to support investments that can improve the living conditions of the poor in a sustainable manner. Identification of poor households as well as setting development priorities were tasks decided by the village meeting convened by officials elected by the village. To maintain a democratic and transparent process for managing the LDF, investment decisions were taken by the village meeting.
The second phase:
- Consolidated the results achieved in the local areas
- Developed and analyzed less expensive ways of successfully applying the same approach, making it replicable nation-wide
- Made the results and the procedures behind these results well-known and communicated, for obtaining impact on Socio Economic Development planning, policy-making and application of already existing policies within the fields of poverty reduction, rural development, decentralization and grassroots democracy
ORGUT provided technical assistance and advice to the Ministry of Planning and Investments and the Provincial Peoples Committees in Ha Giang and Quang Tri in particular in developing and promoting the decentralized, rights-based approach to local governance. It was decided to test the development of Strategic Environmental Impact assessments on District level in order to enhance the capabilities of local administrations to consider environmental and climate change issues when implementing decentralized and participatory planning.
The M&E system of Chia Se 1 was fully established and brought online at the end of 2008, just as the project was about to close down. A Filed Survey of 1,000 households was undertaken in August 2008 to assess the socio-economic situation at the end of CS1 and, as far as possible, try and identify the direction of change in selected indicators. Those two functions were operated and maintained by General Statistics Office as one of the participating agencies in the programme. For Chia Se 2 it was essential to resume some of these services from the outset of the project in order both to establish the necessary sources of management information, and to measure the changes brought about as a result of the second phase. This required defining the specific tasks entailed in these two operations, and providing GSO with the necessary resources for implementing them. It also entailed streamlining and slimming down the initial overambitious M&E system so that it would actually be implemented.
The M&E advisor assisted Ministry of Planning and Investment to develop and test a complete M&E system for the Chia se poverty alleviation program Phase 2. In addition, the Monitoring and Evaluation advisor provided technical assistance to a consultant team contracted by the Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI) that should establish a monitoring and evaluation system for socio-economic development planning.