A monitoring and evaluation officer spends all his/her time ensuring that the project activities, outputs and outcomes are being achieved as planned. Think of a monitoring and evaluation officer as the eyes and ears of management. The purpose of having such a person cannot be overly emphasized because its clearly written on walls. The M&E officers main responsibility is to ensure that the plans in the strategy are being fulfilled. Its easier said than done because this can get a lot complicated especially if there are budgetary constraints, technical or even buy in from Management. In order to fully understand the role of Monitoring and Evaluation Officers, lets understand what would happen if they were not present.
Life without a Monitoring and Evaluation Officer
Every project has what is known as a project document which defines exactly what the project intends to achieve and how its going to achieve it. The activities to be undertaken are well articulated and they are presented in an orderly fashion. Each of these activities contribute to something. I like to use the example of construction of a dam. When you undertake such an activity, the ultimate goal is to have a dam constructed that would generated power. But the question is, why do we need this power generated? Well probably because we want to improve the performance of the economy. When there is more electricity then industry's will perform better and with high production comes increased employment and income levels. All this eventually leads to reduced poverty.
Ask yourself another question, who is responsible for monitoring whether these activities are being carried out properly? Who actually does the reports and provides recommendations on how to best improve on a problem that has been spotted? It is the M&E Officer. However, for those of you who think that just anybody can do this, well think again. An M&E officer needs sufficient time and the skills required to really understand why activities could be dragging. Lets look at a practical example, imagine you are running a social protection project which requires social cash transfers to a group of people in a certain region.
For those of you who don't know what a social cash transfer is, it is a pro poor initiative usually implemented by government in order to alleviate poverty and injustice by giving out cash to project beneficiaries. Usually this 'free cash" is targeted to the vulnerable such as the poor widows, young girls or even the lame. The way this cash is channeled is by using structure's in place existent in the country that can reach the poorest of the poor. When we talk about a social cash transfer we are talking about very big money. Now questions arise sometimes whether this cash is really reaching the intended beneficiaries. As M&E officer sometimes you may hear of rumors that actually the Cash is not always reaching the intended beneficiaries. Now, management may receive these report but will have to rely on the M&E officer to verify them. Questions will be asked;
> Could it be that people are not aware that the funds are available or
> Could it be corruption.
It doesn't always have to do with verifying reports, but an M&E officer will conduct spot checks to ensure that the dispersion points are carrying out the correct procedure when handling cash. He will also have random interviews with both project beneficiaries and project staff in order to ensure that everything is going on fine.
Sometimes an M&E officer is not seen as a popular figure because of the role he plays in gathering accurate information. In trying moments, an M&E officer has to good interpersonal skills, foresight wisdom and ability to read in between the lines in order to be successful. All these are not easy and its not something you can find with just anybody. M&E officers require long hours to try to get to the bottom of things, the TRUTH.
Monitoring and Evaluation Officer JOB DESCRIPTION
A monitoring and evaluation must have the following requirements;
> Diploma or higher qualification in a related field
> Masters is an added advantage
> Years of experience
> Analytical
> Strong interpersonal skills
>Experience in planning and managing surveys.
>Experience developing and refining data collection tools.
>Experience with data quality assessments and oversight
>Experience managing and providing ongoing training to M&E field officers.
>ability to facilitate and serve as a project liaison for externally-managed evaluations
>Fluency in French, English language proficiency – local language a plus.
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