This year's Monitoring and Evaluation Award goes to the South Asia Region for the attention the Region has given to strengthening and promoting monitoring and evaluation across several sectors. In the Health, Nutrition, and Population sector, the Region has undertaken a candid self-evaluation of the state of monitoring and evaluation called "Measuring Results: A Review of Monitoring and Evaluation in Health, Nutrition, and Population Operations in South Asia and Some Practical Suggestions for Implementation". Also in the Health, Nutrition, and Population sector, the Region has developed a scorecard to assess the implementation status of monitoring and evaluation in active health projects. The scorecard can help evaluate progress on data collection, data analysis and utilization, monitoring and evaluation capacity building, and impact evaluations, and includes management comments (from sector and country managers). In Afghanistan, the Region has supported the implementation and publication of health facility surveys on a regular basis and randomized trial of different approaches to controlling diarrhea, including tube-wells, point of use treatment with dilute sodium hypochlorite, and hygiene education.
In the Agriculture and Rural Development sector, the Region has developed a Baseline Survey Toolkit to undertake and supervise baseline surveys. In the Water Supply and Sanitation sector, preliminary results are available from the formal evaluation of the Total Sanitation Campaign in three districts of Maharashtra, India. Staff in the World Bank Office in New Delhi, India, have been assisting the Government of India to design and implement an impact evaluation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act--one of the largest safety net programs in India. In the Education sector, the Region is evaluating the impact of policy interventions on educational outcomes–often in collaboration with federal and state governments--in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. |
