Monitoring and evaluation practices on performance of socio-economic empowerment projects: a case of women and law in Southern Africa Research and Education Trust Project

Abstract

This study seeks to investigate the influence of the monitoring and evaluation practices on the performance of socio-economic empowerment projects. The study is based on three objectives; to assess the influence of monitoring and evaluation stakeholder engagement, monitoring and evaluation budget allocation and monitoring and evaluation planning on the performance of the socio-economic empowerment project performance. The theoretical framework covered empowerment evaluation theory, resource-based view theory, and the theory of change. The study adopted quantitative approaches to gather in-depth understanding of the research variables and to afford a researcher an opportunity to make informed recommendations using both words and numbers. The research site for the study is Women and Law Southern Africa -Lesotho. The target population of 68 officers comprise the project team, associates and the representatives of the stakeholders involved. A census method was adopted and the researcher used questionnaires to collect data from 68 respondents. Closed ended questionnaires were administered electronically by hand delivery or email and provision was made to self-administer the questionnaire depending of the respondent’s convenience. COVID-19 era regulations were maintained in instances of faceto-face meetings. The research instruments were piloted with the eight people comprising researcher’s colleagues at the Bank who are conversant with monitoring and evaluation concepts and four classmates at Africa Nazarene University located in other African countries to gain perspective and context of other similar countries. To test reliability the research tools were piloted before actual data collections. Further, Cronbach’s alpha co-efficient were used to estimate instrument reliability using the pilot responses and it returned 0.818 which was fairly high. Content and face validity were adopted to test instrument validity. Proper authorizations were secured from relevant bodies to conduct the study and SPSS Version 23 data analysis software was deployed to analyse collected data. The researcher further analysed the data with means and standard deviation to measure central tendencies and dispersion of the data. The finding of the study were that there were some contradictions to the previous findings while some findings supported findings previously returned by other studies. The project team should ensure collaboration with other key stakeholders during detailed stakeholder analysis and there should be proportionate engagement of stakeholders. The team should maintain the M&E budget separately and promote transparency by issuing the M&E budget performance reports. Project planning and reporting are key and the team should be capacitated to develop realistic plans and plausible logic models. The study made recommendations for improve M&E stakeholder engagement, M&E budgeting and project planning. The study recommended comparative studies to be conducted on other socio-economic empowerment projects and usage of hybrid approaches of qualitative and quantitative approaches so at to gather as much information as possible. The study further recommended that more studies to explore other monitoring and evaluation practices that can influence the performance of the socio-economic empowerment projects.