Assessment of the Monitoring and Evaluation System’s Effectiveness in a Forest and Landscape Restoration Project Under Ethiopia’s REDD+ Investment Program

This Working Paper is part of Forest and Landscape Restoration within Forests. Reach out to Yigremachew Seyoum Lemma for more information.

Research to examine the key challenges that impact the effectiveness of the M&E system is crucial for providing guidance to policymakers, project managers, and practitioners to design a robust M&E system. Enhanced accountability and transparency provided through a robust M&E system play a key role in catalyzing the flow of capital to scale and expanding efforts to restore degraded forests and landscapes and realize targets outlined at global, continental, and national levels.

This study investigates the factors that determine the effectiveness of the M&E system of the FLR project under the REDD+ Investment Program (RIP) in Ethiopia (MEFCC 2017). The RIP, with a budget of US$75 million, was implemented from 2017 to 2022 in six regions and one city administration in Ethiopia, covering 113 woredas (administrative units equivalent to districts). The second phase of the RIP program has been implemented since 2023. The RIP has three main components: afforestation and reafforestation (FLR), reversing degradation and deforestation (DD), and forest sector transformation (FST), which is mandated to transform the forest sector through innovative models. This study focused on the M&E system of the RIP's FLR component (RIP-FLR), which was implemented in 54 woredas.

Key Findings:

• Most of the survey respondents indicated that there is some level of satisfaction among the RIP-FLR project staff with the current M&E system. However, an in-depth analysis of the different elements of the M&E system revealed gaps that need further improvement. Improvement measures to address the gaps can foster stakeholder satisfaction, enable actions to correct budget and schedule discrepancies, and facilitate better use of lessons from successful practices.
• More than a third of the respondents said skill gaps in M&E data analysis and gender-responsive M&E practices, as well as the lack of on-the-job capacity-building trainings, are major challenges facing the M&E system of the RIP-FLR project.
• More than two-thirds of the respondents believe that the budget allocated for M&E activities is insufficient, that project staff lack full authority to manage and make decisions regarding the budget, and that the budget is not exclusively used for M&E activities.
• More than a third of the respondents feel that the use of knowledge management (KM) for M&E data collection, analysis, generating valuable information, and documenting lessons and best practices for adaptive management is very limited.
• Most of the respondents considered managers' support for the planning and implementation of M&E activities and facilitation of skill development trainings to be inadequate. Furthermore, they found managers' use of M&E findings in day-to-day communication and decision-making to be weak.
• More than a third of the respondents believe that engagement of stakeholders in planning M&E activities, identifying indicators, collecting data, and making decisions is limited. Moreover, more than half of the respondents feel that the RIP-FLR project does not provide clearly defined M&E roles for stakeholders.
• More than a quarter of the project staff tend to perceive M&E as a task intended to capture mistakes rather than a tool that provides useful feedback for decision-making by project managers. There is also a tendency to consider it as an additional task that burdens project staff, showing a misconception of the benefits of M&E.