Since 1st July 2004 the German coordination office of the project "NGO Impact on Development, Empowerment and Actions" (http://www.ngo-ideas.net/) is located at Karl Kübel Stiftung in Bensheim/Germany.
NGO-IDEAS is a joint project of 14 German non-governmental organisations from the development sector, 32 partner-organisations from South India, as well as Parität (http://www.paritaet.org/), Germany, and VENRO (http://www.venro.org/). Apart from the contributions of these actors, the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ, http://www.bmz.de/de/index.html) is financially supporting the project.
The main objective of the project is that rural and urban families who are living in poverty will be integrated more intensively and actively in the monitoring of the NGO-projects and in the learning processes for better using the possibilities of the NGO-projects to alleviate poverty.
It is expected that through participatory impact monitoring the project impacts for the target groups can be improved, in detail
- through stronger involvement of the target groups in monitoring and learing processes (participatory monitoring);
- through more frequent monitoring and evaluation processes (more intensive M&E);
- through stronger impact orientation in project monitoring (impact monitoring).
The sub-objective is that the NGOs are able to perceive and document in a participatory way the impacts of their project work on their target groups and social environment and to orient their management decisions accordingly.
The objective of the project is achieved through the following expected results:
- The impacts of the NGO-project work are systemized and documented in an exemplary way for one region (South India) and one sector (saving and credit programmes).
- The NGOs are exchanging their experiences concerning "best practices" of the methods of the participatory impact monitoring and are helping each other in their application.
- Methods and instruments of participatory impact monitoring are tested and improved through monitoring as far as South and North NGOs are concerned.
- Methods and instruments of the participatory impact monitoring are documented in a publication ("Toolbox").
