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Developing our internal processes to ensure the high quality of our work

Published on Thursday, 31st of July 2014

At CMI, we are strongly committed to developing our internal processes and systems to meet all required standards and the public demand for demonstrated benefits. Our planning, monitoring and evaluation process is a comprehensive joint effort to ensure the high quality of our work.

After establishing an internal planning, monitoring and evaluation (PME) support function in the previous year, in 2013 we rolled out the first series of PME activities to support our projects.

While our programme objectives for effectiveness and impact are quite ambitious, it should be noted that the field of conflict resolution and peacebuilding offers few quick wins for showing easily measurable results. The environments we operate in are typically complex, fluid and risky. In these circumstances, demonstrating cause and effect in simplistic terms is not possible or even desirable.

Our key objectives

Taking into account the complex and fragile environments where we work, our PME process is built as a joint effort with three key objectives:

Learning: Adaptive learning is crucial when operating in the socio-political spaces of highly complex environments. A structured PME process helps to reflect on experiences, adapt to change and learn from past experiences. It allows for internal learning across the organisation.

Enhanced management: PME supports the successful implementation of CMI’s programme and projects. As a resource for management, it builds our adaptive capacity to reinforce that which is working and reform that which is not.

Accountability: Increased capacities in continuous learning and enhanced management will enable us to better meet external accountability expectations. Ultimately, our accountability to beneficiaries is about making a difference in conflict resolution.

Focus on enhanced effectiveness

In 2014, we will continue to work on improving the PME process both in terms of measuring the change achieved and CMI’s contribution to the broader context. We particularly focus on improving our capacities to monitor, assess and manage results.

More broadly, we hope to also provide a credible expert voice to the international debate on effectiveness and impact assessment in the field of conflict resolution and peacebuilding. We believe in cross-learning and cooperation with others, also from less traditional backgrounds such as systems analysis.