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Extension programmes are usually focused at alleviating poverty and improving the quality of rural life, which is a time consuming process and requires careful monitoring of the resources to achieve the maximum objectives.
Therefore, it becomes very important to monitor and evaluate what happens during programme implementation so as to help the programme implementors to direct programme on the right path.
Monitoring and evaluation of the programmes play a key role in implementation and hence help to determine the results and impact of its intervention on the target beneficiaries. It helps to know whether the programmes have led to –
- An increased income and consumption
- Expanded access of people to basic services
- Created better living conditions for the rural folks
Monitoring and evaluation are two inter related processes that are used to guide decision-makers about how programmes should be carried out to achieve the desired results and benefits. The four important concepts which are basic to monitoring and evaluation are –
- Capability: refers in terms of physical, financial and human resources, which are being used by the client group of the programme. Extension performance depends directly upon its capability.
- Effectiveness: is defined as “the degree to which goals are attained”. Among the different extension goals such as social goals (rural welfare), economic goals (increased income) and many others, the operational goals like physical and financial are of special significance, because with this, other goals are also easily achieved.
- Efficiency: refers to the speed at which the client group is adopting the recommended practices.
- Impact: after measuring different indicators, the results obtained help to determine the success and failure of programmes.
These above correspond respectively, to
- Operational investment: e.g., investment in agricultural extension per farm family.
- Operational efficiency: e.g., the number of visits, meetings, demonstrations and trials per extension worker.
- Technical efficiency: e.g. the number of adopters, output and value added.
- Extension: induced changes e.g. production, productivity, income and income distribution.
Capability, effectiveness and efficiency are included in monitoring and impact falls under evaluation.
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