The paper considers the benefits and downsides of project monitoring and its relationship with country-led systems.
Published on: 01/04/2013
The keynote paper Project monitoring: A vicious cycle of donor accountability or a necessary stepping stone to better national WASH sector monitoring? has been written to accompany the topic stream project monitoring at the “Monitoring Sustainable WASH Service Delivery Symposium” in Addis Ababa in April 2013. The fundamental premise or starting position for this debate is that we consider strong, country-led monitoring capacity to be the desired outcome.
The paper considers the benefits and downsides of project monitoring and its relationship with country-led systems and aims to explore how complementarities between them can be brought to bear in strengthening long-term capacity to monitor. We define what is meant by the term ‘project monitoring’ and discuss why this subject is important for delivering sustainable WASH services at scale. We examine the main themes and challenges, including the issue of accountability that sits at the heart of this debate. We refer to a number of examples where synergies have been attempted, resulting in a ‘win-win’ approach that can contribute to strengthening national capacity and improve data availability, knowledge, planning, and management. Finally, we look at some emerging lessons and success factors and propose some areas for further discussion during the symposium itself.
