A number of Danish Embassies (Lusaka, La Paz, Kathmandu and Managua) have requested and received support in the form of a small mission (from TAS and KVA) to improve their monitoring and indicator systems. The objective of this page is, based on the experiences from the monitoring missions, to provide some advice to the remaining Danish Embassies in order to improve their monitoring systems and ensure a gradual alignment of Danish supported activities to MDGs and PRSP at country level. First of all a few general words of advice, when (re)designing a monitoring system:
If the objectives are clear the result chain – targets and indicators, on output, outcome and impact levels, etc. – is much easier to establish.If indicators and monitoring are simple, rely on country systems, and are harmonised the results reporting should not only be less costly but also be much easier to communicate and to use for comparative analysis. Based on the experiences from the monitoring missions it is recommended that each Embassy who wishes to follow up on the policies of indicators and monitoring systems organises a seminar to do this. If it is well prepared a seminar of two to three days should be sufficient.The enclosed Terms of Reference for the Monitoring Missions outlines the quite extensive preparation work for each of the workshops, which was collected by an external consultant, but the data was provided by the Embassy staff and most importantly by the programme responsible in the Danida supported programmes. The seminar could then consist of a general introduction to the issues for all; followed by an individual session for each of the major programmes, where each of the programmes develop a follow-up plan and finally a session where Embassy and Programme responsible persons jointly agree on a Process Action Plan for all of the programmes on aligning indicators and monitoring fro PRSP to VPA level.Technical Advisory Services (TAS) with Quality Assurance dep. (KVA) in Copenhagen may on request from embassies advise on organising such a seminar. The following material (with the content of this web-site) can be used as inspiration:
