Siaya County: End Line Assessment of Monitoring and Evaluation Capacity

Author(s): MEASURE Evaluation PIMA

Year: 2017

Abstract:

This report is a brief synthesis of an end line assessment undertaken to discern and document the capacity of the county health management teams to perform monitoring and evaluation (M&E) functions in Siaya County, Kenya, in order to understand the impact of MEASURE Evaluation PIMA (MEval-PIMA) in improving M&E systems at the county level.

The MEval-PIMA project, funded by the United States Agency for International Development, was implemented between December 2012 and June 2016. As part of the project closeout, MEval-PIMA conducted an end-of-project assessment to document achievements and provide lessons learned toward strengthening capacity of the Ministry of Health at the national and subnational levels to produce and use high-quality data for decision making and to communicate project results with stakeholders and beneficiaries. Specifically, the end line assessment aimed to accomplish the following:

• Document changes in M&E capacity since the baseline assessments were conducted.
• Document the key drivers of changes in M&E capacity.
• Document MEval-PIMA’s contribution to the changes in M&E capacity.
• Document lessons learned in terms of strengthening M&E capacity at individual and organizational levels.

The end line assessment was conducted in a five-day workshop setting using three participatory data collection tools. Respondents for this exercise were program managers and program officers, including M&E officers and data managers from Narok County.

We found that, although Siaya made remarkable progress between the baseline and end line assessments, the biggest threat to the sustainability of these gains is low prioritization of M&E in the county budgeting process and inadequate funding for M&E activities, such as printing data collection and reporting tools. Participants offered a series of recommendations to address these and other threats.