Identify your evaluation questions

Table 18 below provides a general example of the types of questions you may need to consider. These need to be tailored to your particular context and adaptation options. The number of questions you select will depend on the complexity of your adaptation process, the resources you have available and the purpose of your M&E. It is best to identify three or four critical evaluation questions, which might also have further sub-questions.

Some of the most valuable lessons can be learned by looking beyond what you expected to happen and exploring what was not anticipated. This could be positive (e.g. the peer-to-peer farmer training directly led to the sharing of labor at key times during the year) or negative (e.g. the technical interventions worked well, but uptake was poor because we didn’t involve community leaders at the start).

Be sure to include some open questions to take these factors into account. For example, rather than simply asking, “Did farmers find the training useful?” ask “What did the farmers find useful during the training?” It is important to capture these lessons and also to ask, “What had most value for the people involved?” – it may not be what you expect. This will help you to improve plans for the next phase.

Objectives

• To identify the evaluation questions, which will determine whether you are ‘doing things right’ and ‘doing the right thing’.
• To identify questions that will help to capture information that fulfills the purpose of the evaluation, as well as the following:
  • the progress of planned activities and outcomes
  • the roles, responsibilities and level of engagement of farmers and other stakeholders involved in implementation
  • the appropriateness of the logic you used in preparing the operational plan, including assumptions about how activities help to achieve the overall purpose
  • if and how unexpected or unintended outcomes have arisen and the consequences of these

Expected outputs

• A list of questions to be used in the evaluation process.
• Completion of part B of the evaluation plan.

Required time

Variable, depending on the amount of engagement involved.

Guiding questions

The following table provides an example of evaluation questions for each of the four key aspects of evaluating an adaptation process. Feel free to change these questions to suit your own evaluation or think of additional questions for each aspect.

Group discussions with key people involved in the project design (see section A), informed by the project objectives, assumptions from developing a theory of change and the outputs of the previous discussions and workshops.