Report of the Monitoring and Evaluation Workshop

Atengdem, P.B. 2011. Report of the Monitoring and Evaluation Workshop. CPWF Workshop Report. Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso: CPWF.

The Monitoring and Evaluation workshop was organized for key staff of the Volta Basin Development Challenge (VBDC) as part of the process in developing a Monitoring Plan for the VBDC of the Challenge Programme Water and Food (CPWF) Phase II. The Challenge Programme on Water & Food in Volta Basin (CPWF-Volta) was initiated as part of the global CGIAR Challenge program on Water and Food currently on-going in Asia, Africa and South America. The CPWF research (Phase II) in the basin is planned to run from 2010 -2013 as a follow-up on the first Phase of CPWF which ran from 2003-2009. The current program explores the institutional and technical aspects of small reservoir development and maintenance, embedded within a wider rainwater management system for the Volta River Basin.

The main objective of the research program is to respond to: “Improve rainwater and small reservoir management to contribute to poverty reduction, and improved livelihoods resilience and people’s well- being in the dry lands of Burkina Faso and Northern Ghana while taking account of implications for downstream water users including ecosystem services”.

The Volta Basin Development Challenge (VBDC) was therefore an initiative to achieve that objective through five interconnected but focused research-for-development projects, termed as V1, V2, V3, V4 and V5.

The key Expected results of each of the 5 interconnected projects are highlighted below.

V1: Targeting & Scaling up: based on socio-economic and bio-physical assessments, it will develop a web-based `decision-support tool’ to identify appropriate sites to introduce successful Agricultural Water Management interventions. (Partners: SEI, INERA, OoU, SARI, KNUST).

V2: Management of rainwater for crop-livestock Agro-ecosystems: will identify, evaluate, adapt, and disseminate best-fit integrated rainwater management strategies (RMS), comprising of technological solutions, directed at different domains of the agro-ecosystems, strengthened by enabling institutional and policy environments and linked to market incentives that can drive adoption. (Partners: ILRI, IWMI, WUR-PPS, INERA, WRI & SNV)

V3: Management of Small Reservoirs: focuses on integrated management options at local scale for small reservoirs (SR), in a multiple use context. These include maintaining infrastructures, protecting and where necessary improving the water quality for the various uses; enhancing water productivity potentials; and seeking for equity (Partners: CIRAD – G- EauIRD, 2iE, TU-Delft, WRI, INERA, SARI).

V4: Governance of rainwater and small reservoirs: Project V4 will provide understanding of the processes that govern IWRM policy-making, practice and research in the basin and identify demand- driven opportunities for the management and the governance of rainwater and small reservoirs at the watershed (sub-basin) level. This will enhance impacts of on-going policy initiatives in the Volta basin.(Partners: IWMI, CIRAD; UPR-Green, SP-PAGIRE, WRC, WRI, UDS).

V5: Coordination and enabling change this project is responsible for leadership and coordination of the above VBDC projects to ensure coherence, integration, alignment and delivery of research outcome related rainwater and small reservoir management. It is also an active concept development and feedback mechanism for the VBDC as a whole. (Partners: VBA, GWP, IWMI and INERA).

For each of the projects, a theory of change was defined and expressed in project outcome logic model (OLM) which shows average of four outcome pathways per project. Based on the project OLMs, the VBDC level OLM was also drafted, and needs to be improved and agreed upon.