1. Project Selection and Evaluation Ian Ross President, ODA

2. What are we looking for in a project? 1.Community Involvement 2.Sustainability 3.Worthwhile Work

3. What are we looking for? 1. Community involvement: Why is this valuable? -Making sure projects are useful -Ownership: ‘agents not patients’ -Sustainability What does this actually mean? -Communities identifying the need (PRA) -Wide base (i) not just NGO pulling weight (ii) no exclusion of women -Community finance – bigger stake -Local volunteer involvement

4. What are we looking for? 2. Sustainability: - Needs community involvement, or there will be no interest - Partner NGO involved in community on a permanent basis - Building lasting relationships based on trust

5. What are we looking for? 3. Worthwhile work: (i) Unskilled work - Not displacing local people - Recognising our limitations (ii) Teaching - Can short-term projects have impact? - Never main focus with ODA

6. How do we achieve this? 1.Finding a project 2.Assessing a project 3.Post-Project Evaluation

7. How do we achieve this? 1. Finding projects - Share information between us through SVOP and be critical of NGOs - Use personal contacts where possible - Beware of approaches by interested parties - If no contacts, use DevDir

8. How do we achieve this? 2. Assessing potential projects Assessment criteria (Project Guidelines) 1. Security of volunteers – risk assessments 2. Contact close to community as possible 3. NGO transparency through budget breakdowns 4. Ongoing involvement of the NGO in the community 5. Ethos of NGO 6. Practicalities – getting there, political situation of country

9. How do we achieve this? 3. Evaluation of Project (a) In-project evaluation - Get volunteers to ask the right questions to the right people (participation techniques?) - Make volunteers aware through training - Empower volunteers through Micro-Fund (b) Post-project evaluation -NGO wrap-up (criticise each other nicely…) -ODA wrap-up (ditto…) - Micro-Fund report

10. What are the right questions? (i) Who’s powerful in the village and why? Did they think the project was worthwhile? (ii) Ditto for the marginalised people in the village; is there a difference? (iii) What project would people have preferred to see done and why? Was there any resentment caused by our project? (iv) How well have the NGO researched the project on the basis of this? (v) Should we go back next year based on this, and should we use the same NGO?

11. Conclusion - It’s easy to run projects - It’s easy to talk the talk - We need to walk the walk, and constantly criticise and re- evaluate what we do.