Development Performance Indicators

This organisation, and others in the area, and those in other countries, and actually many aided projects around the globe have, and still do, lack in sufficiently monitoring and reporting on their impact. One of the reasons why aid failed in the past is because the development organisations weren’t held accountable for adequately indicating what their funds have achieved, and therefore donors are becoming more and more demanding on wanting to see proof of the return on their investment.

I picked up this deficiency in RDIS’ management of projects and over the last few weeks, developed a model for monitoring progress of their project objectives adequately, using KPI’s, in order to obtain figures as proof of the project’s impact. RDIS is definitely achieving a lot and has great success in what they do, but they have been challenged lately with the question of: where is the proof? I had to throw my PRINCE2 principles almost completely out of the window, as things here just work so much differently to the UK (perhaps someone should devise CHIEF2 principles for rural Africa?!). My aim was to come up with something that could be practically implementable here.

The RDIS coordinator was so enthusiastic about my suggestions that he gave me a whole morning at their monthly ‘board’ meeting to present the model. The presentation was quite unique to what I’ve experienced so far, having had to pause after every sentence to allow time for the interpreter. All in all, my propositions were received very well and the concepts introduced were understood clearly. But right now I’m not the most favoured person around, having exposed them to this challenge.

Though I tried to make the model as practical as possible, I still have my fears on whether it will be implementable as is. Time will only tell. Meanwhile, the first steps of action need to be taken now. Next week, I will start to visit each staff member in the different regions to help them implement the performance indicators in current and upcoming projects. Quite looking forward to that!