From: Inglis, Andrew (FONP) To twgdahl@online.no & many more; Cc: asinglis@gmail.com

Dear friends, mentors, colleagues, associates, etc.

Thanks for all your support / help / advice / chats / criticsm / encouragement / complaints /slights over the past 2 years - they all helped to inspire me, keep me going and trying new things ...

My interim/personal email for any advice, feedback, whatever, is asinglis@gmail.com

Warm regards,

Andy Inglis

-----Original Message-----
From: Muller, Eva (FONP) Sent: 30 June 2005 16:26 To: FONP list Subject: FW: Final evaluation GCP/808/INT/UK
Dear colleagues,

Please find attached the independent final evaluation by Dr Don Gimour and Dr Paul Sarfo Mensah of the UK/DFID -funded project "Strengthening Participatory Approaches to Forest Management in Ghana, Guyana & Uganda" (GCP/INT/808/UK). Their report is presented in 3 separate Word documents - 1 Executive summary only (nedenfor)/2 Full report without annexes / 3 Annexes only. For your information, the report attracted the following comments from FAO's Evaluation Service (PBEE):

"....it is an excellent report, clearly written, well prepared, well reasoned in its conclusions and recommendations, and quite useful as a repository of lessons learned from the project. The annexes, and especially the five case studies, greatly enrich and support the main text....."

Please contact me or Dominique Reeb (Dominique.Reeb@fao.org) with any feedback, requests for further information, or if you have any suggested recipients of the interactive CD the project has been using. Best regards, Eva Muller

Chief, Forestry Policy and Institutions Service , Forestry Policy and Information Division
Forestry Department ,FAO ,Viale delle Terme di Caracalla ,00100 Rome, Italy
Tel.: (39) 06 570 54628 ,Fax: (39) 06 570 55514 ,E-mail: Eva.Muller@fao.org

The project commenced in May 2002 with funding from DFID equivalent to USD 1.6m, and is scheduled to conclude on 15th May 2005. This evaluation is intended to provide recommendations to the three Governments (i.e. Ghana, Guyana and Uganda), FAO and DFID on the further steps necessary to consolidate progress and ensure achievement of objectives. The two-person evaluation team worked intermittently between late January and early May 2005. One week was spent at FAO headquarters in Rome in late January followed by time in Uganda, Guyana and Ghana, culminating in attendance by the evaluation team at the end-of-project workshop in Kumasi, Ghana in late April. As part of the evaluation, case studies were carried out in each of the three countries to assess the impact of Project activities on the long term development goal of reducing poverty of forest fringe communities. During the evaluation, there was an explicit attempt by the team to interact with Project staff in a participatory manner and to discuss and debate findings as they were coming to light. This was intended to reinforce the open, transparent and action research modality that characterised the Project and its management.

The purpose of the Project is best described by reference to the Goals and Purpose in the 2001 Project document, which remained unaltered throughout the life of the Project.

Reduced poverty in two African countries and in one Caribbean country.

There were no lower level objectives in the original Project design, but four were added in December 2003, along with revised and added outputs. This provided much greater clarity and improved logic to the Project planning matrix. Key features of the Project have been:

• Primarily targeting middle level managers of state forest institutions (e.g. District/Division forestry officers);
• The piloting of novel and innovative approaches for building capacity to apply participatory work practices, in particular, in situ mentoring and e-learning;
• An initial emphasis on a limited number of "core" participatory methods in order to create a "software" approach to their use;
• Attempts in each country to take participation and participatory working practices out of the Community Forestry/Collaborative Forest Management "ghetto", and make them available to district managers;
• Promoting and facilitating the increased use of IT within middle management;
• Facilitating South-South experience exchange and technical assistance.

The Governments of all three countries are undertaking fundamental reform of their forest sectors to make them more efficient and effective, and particularly more client oriented. The Project has actively supported these reforms.

During the first year of the Project three different people occupied the International Coordinator position, and this resulted in lack of a clear strategic focus. Initially, the Project was perceived as having a major emphasis on supporting the implementation of participatory forest management (PFM) in the three countries rather than on strengthening the institutional environment for PFM by improving the participatory skills of middle level managers in the forest bureaucracies. In addition, the approach being considered for capacity building was somewhat conventional, with an emphasis on carrying out a Training Needs Analysis (TNA) and ex situ training of a range of unspecified stakeholders using the previously prepared Participatory Process material. However, from the middle of 2003 the use of in situ training of middle level managers using a mentoring approach became a central tenet of the capacity building, particularly in Ghana and Uganda where the institutional setting was conducive to this.

After mid-2003 the Project also moved to adopt a more explicit action-research modality in its implementation style, and this has characterised its operations since that time. As a result, key Project staff are constantly being challenged (by themselves as well as by others) to be reflective, flexible and adaptive. Other characteristics that go hand in hand with this include being open and transparent with decision making, budgeting, etc. The adoption of this approach has been a major strength of the Project, and has yielded considerable benefits in terms of developing novel and innovative approaches and in empowering staff to take control of their own learning.

The management style emanating from FAO in Rome (since mid-2003) has encapsulated very effectively the fundamental thrust of the Project in terms of adopting participatory working practices at all levels. It has emphasised "managing with a light touch" and empowering colleagues at the country level in the Project. This management style has been instrumental in contributing to a strong sense of national ownership of the process in all three countries, with positive consequences for mainstreaming and institutionalising the changed attitudes and behaviours.

Focused mentoring and training to develop capacity among middle level managers to apply participatory practices in the workplace did not effectively commence until early 2004, due to the leadership changes at the international level, and the consequent lack of clear strategic focus. As a result, the impacts seen during the evaluation are the result of a little more than a year of activities.

Participatory evaluation exercises were carried out with mentors and those being mentored (mentees) in Ghana and Uganda and with a group of trainees in Guyana. The results indicated clearly that the attitudes and behaviours of middle managers have been significantly altered by their exposure to and adoption of participatory practices in their day-to-day work. The consensus comments from them in the following Box give an indication of how they perceive the results of the mentoring / training process.

Discussions with senior managers and external stakeholders indicated clearly that they had perceived significant changes in attitude and behaviour of middle managers (see selected quotes in the following Box).

The impact of the Project is clearly evident in all countries, and can be summed up as:

• Improved morale and confidence among middle managers;
• Greater trust between middle managers and communities (and other external stakeholders);
• Acquisition by middle managers of participatory tools and methods to enable them to interact effectively with colleagues and stakeholders to resolve day-to-day management issues (that were previously difficult or impossible to address);

The future effects are likely to be substantial, as the benefits are only just beginning to become apparent. Among these are likely to be:

• Greater flow of forest goods and services to local communities, leading to improved livelihoods and a reduction in poverty;
• Decrease in forest encroachment and other illegal activities;
• A move towards Sustainable Forest Management (balancing economic, environmental and social outcomes).

The results of the case studies give clear indications that the new attitudes and behaviours of the middle managers have broken previously existing communication barriers and laid the foundations for local communities to share directly in utilising forest resources that were previously denied them. The lesson learnt from one of the case studies in Uganda (shown in Box) sums up the situation.

In all three countries the approaches taken to capacity building have had a major impact on middle managers and on external stakeholders—the mentoring approach in particular has proven to be a novel and innovative process for building capacity to apply participatory practices in the work place.

Audits (essentially scoping studies) of the forestry education institutions were carried out in all three countries. In most cases the approach to teaching was very traditional and the curricula did not use participatory approaches to assist learning. Recommendations contained in the reports for improving the curricula of the institutions have not been implemented, not because of a lack of relevance, but rather because of the lack of an enabling institutional environment for fundamental change. In Uganda’s Nyabyeya Forestry College two of the senior staff, who are also involved as monitors with the Project, have attempted with some success to use various participatory approaches in their teaching.

For a variety of institutional reasons, there was little if any interaction between the education institutions and the employing agencies in most cases. The audits proved to be a major benefit as they created a platform for a dialogue between the forestry implementation agencies and the relevant education institutions that train future staff. The removal of institutional blockages by the application of participatory techniques has enabled staff from the various organisations to engage in a constructive dialogue and to be mutually supportive.

Characteristics that have made the mentoring approach to capacity building so effective include:

• Senior national leadership is committed to fundamental institutional reform;
• The approach of the Project is totally supportive of the national institutional reform agendas;
• Support for the training and the need for attitudinal and behavioural change came from senior levels in the agencies;
• The National Project Coordinators are in direct line management with the middle managers, are intimately involved in day-to-day Project implementation and are highly committed to the change process (they are effective local champions);
• Application of a systems approach to capacity building, with the key aspects being:
• Use of an interactive CD (for access to tools, methods, case studies and tutorials);
• Application of a phased approach to mentoring—with Phase I focusing on tools and methods, and Phase II on application of the tools and methods to real life management issues on-the-job;
• Use of a comprehensive approach to monitoring performance of those doing the mentoring and those being mentored (particularly in Ghana and Uganda) for quality control and institutional analysis;
• The mentoring approach of on-the-job training over a lengthy period is conducive to effective adult learning;
• The mentoring and training reached a high proportion of middle managers in each country (more than 60%) and a significant number of external stakeholders (ensuring that most people involved with PFM speak the same language);
• The mentoring and training addresses day-to-day issues being faced by the middle managers, ensuring that the tools and methods being learnt can be immediately and effectively applied—reinforcing the learning in the most powerful way possible (this is essentially guided experiential learning);
• The International Coordinator had an appropriate set of skills, approach and experience to act as a senior mentor and provide the necessary strategic focus.

• Utilise any unspent funds to continue in-country activities as a no cost extension for several months to help consolidate the gains made;
• Use the foundation established by the project for designing further inputs (nfps, participatory forestry, participatory working practices in other sectors);
• Seek additional funding to allow the in-country mentoring initiatives to continue for an additional period of 2-3 years so that the full programme of issues-based on-the-job mentoring can be completed and to consolidate the gains to ensure institutional sustainability;
• Prepare several products to ensure that the key findings of the Project are packaged so that they have the maximum influence. These should include:
• A technical report on the approach developed by the Project to institutionalise participatory approaches and methods into middle management of forest bureaucracies;
• A brief paper (more analytical than the one above) distilling the key points in the technical report aimed at publication in the development literature;
• The interactive CD packaged in an attractive form with a brief accompanying brochure for wide distribution.
• For the Governments of Ghana, Guyana and Uganda

Allocate adequate staff and financial resources to:

• Embed participatory approaches in to the institutional fabric of the organisations;
• Expand the training / mentoring approaches for building capacity to apply participatory approaches across the entire forest bureaucracy.

In addition to the recommendations made above:

• Reinforce the use of participatory work practices among middle managers by using an issues based (on-the-job) mentoring / monitoring approach as a follow-up to the tools and methods training.