Monitoring and evaluating with children

This guide, written by Grazyna Bonati for Plan Togo, provides guidance on including children in the monitoring and evaluation of development programs.

It outlines the steps that need to be taken to involve children in each stage of the evaluation and describes specific examples of techniques that can be used to engage children in the process.

Excerpt

"Child participation is increasingly being accepted as good practice in community development programs worldwide. As a result children now participate in many programs, not only during their implementation, but also during their design and planning. It therefore seems both appropriate and logical that they should also take part in assessing the success or failure of such programs. In other words, they should be involved in the monitoring and evaluation of the projects and programs in which they participate and from which they are said to benefit. They are particularly well placed to help us assess the extent to which such programs do in fact benefit them, especially when they are considered the main beneficiaries." (Bonati 2006)

Contents

• Why involve children in evaluation - advantages and constraints 6
• Working with the children 8
• What preparations will facilitate the process? 9
• What can the children do? 10
• At which stages can we involve children? 10
• What techniques can be used? 11
• How can we be sure that the children are safe at all times? 12
• Procedure 13
• Invite the children to a meeting to introduce the activity 13
• Ask for volunteers and aim to form representative group to take part in evaluation 13
• Discuss what we need to know 15
• How can we find out what we need to know? 15
• Planning the investigation 16
• Analysing the results 16
• Presenting the results 16
• Disseminating the results16
• Evaluating the process 16
• Appendix 1: Evaluation - A rough guide 17
• Appendix 2: Doing surveys with children. 19
• Appendix 3: Working and communicating with children  21
• Appendix 4: Some simple techniques to use with children in evaluation 23
• Body map 23
• Evaluation wheel 24
• Impact diagrams 25
• Flow charts 27
• Force field analysis 27
• Village or community map 27
• Spider diagrams 28
• The “H” method 28
• Time line 29
• The pie chart ]. 29
• Checklist for evaluating with children  30