EDIAIS : Conference papers

Richard Bond , Freelance Rural Development Consultant and Research Fellow of Institute for Development Policy and Management, University of Manchester, Prince Kapondamgaga Research Officer, Concern Universal, Dedza, Malawi, and R.P.S. Yadav, Project Coordinator, Indian Farm Forestry Development Co-operative, Pratapgarh, Rajasthan

Monitoring the Livelihood Platform: Reflections on the Operation of LAST

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ABSTRACT

The LAST method (Bond R and Mukherjee N. 2002 'Livelihood Asset Status Tracking: An Impact Monitoring Tool?' Journal of International Development 14, Wiley. ) was developed for impact monitoring of Livelihood projects for ongoing learning by project management. This evolving method uses a locally developed assessment sheet describing the local range of household situations for each of the livelihood capitals. This facilitates the rapid conversion of a judgement by the enumerator into a centile score used for monitoring of the livelihood platform at various levels of aggregation. It has now had several years of operation by DFID supported projects in India and amongst other users more recently has been taken up by Concern Universal in Malawi. Questions that need addressing at this stage of development are discussed. What issues have emerged in the use of the method? Is its utility as the design intended? For example is it really rapid enough to provide good coverage of large projects several times a year, and anyway does management really want to learn about emerging impacts? Can the results of such judgement-based methods be considered as reliable? Do different enumerators score the same? What about biases? Is it accurate? What analysis can be done and what about attribution? How might it be further developed? These are the issues taken up in this paper. Initial results seem promising but caution in application is required.

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