Project News

The Project has introduced the use of "sustainability (maturity) indicators" as a means of evaluating a group’s maturity and level of accomplishment of their objectives (see table below). The "vertical axis" of the indicators (in the table) consists of the evaluation themes in line with the objectives of Project activities; the "horizontal axis" is the 5 levels of maturity or development for each theme. (For greater detail, see Chapter 13 of the "Extension Guidebook (First Edition)".) We began developing these indicators in 2008, and to actively implement them in 2009. They have now been used on 3 occasions and have helped in the monitoring of changes in the groups and in identifying areas in which we need to focus our assistance.

As with other Project activities, we are giving technical transfer of the evaluation activities to the C/P so that they will be able to carry them out on their own. We experimented with the evaluation method changing it slightly each time, but basically the 2 C/P’s (from the "Extension" and "Organizational Strengthening" sections) in charge of each group perform their own evaluation individually. Afterwards, they share their results with each other. If there are differences in the maturity levels they selected, they explain the reason for choosing that level and discuss which of the two viewpoints is most practical and arrive at a single evaluation result. The evaluation results of all the groups, together with changes observed since the last monitoring, are reported in the Project’s internal workshop and all the information is shared among the Project team.

The C/P are unfamiliar with this evaluation method and still lack experience as evaluators. Therefore, it is not certain that reported changes in evaluation results are always reflecting changes in a group’s maturity level. (Furthermore, there are certainly grounds for still improving the indicators themselves.) While explaining such conditions and limitations of the evaluation method, we are continuing to "monitor group activities using sustainability (maturity) indicators" so that the evaluation activity can eventually be adopted as part of the extension system.

Indicators
(The figure can be enlarged by clicking on it.: PDF/87KB)

(Mr. Isao SAKAI, Chief Advisor / Rural Development)