Evaluation of the Environmental Conservation and Awareness Creation project

Background

Green Movement of Sri Lanka (GMSL) was founded in 1998 and had its roots in several Sri Lankan organisations working with environmental issues. The Norwegian Development Fund (DF) has been a partner and donor since the beginning. The organisation was last evaluated for DF in 2003. This present evaluation covers the activities under the Environmental Conservation and Awareness Creation project (also named the core project by GMSL) in the years 2003-2005 and the organisation as it is today.

Purpose/objective

The evaluation focued on two questions:
- How well does the project achieve its stated goals?
- What are the institutional strengths and weaknesses given the organisation's vision?

Methodology

The evaluation took place over four weeks in November and December of 2006. The indicators of success in this evaluation are developed by the evaluator and are mostly based on conversations with the GMSL staff. The evaluation was done through interviews in groups or individually, observation and through analysis of written documentation. An effort was made to narrow the scope of the evaluation so as to be able to speak to enough people to get different views about the same issues.

Key findings

- GMSL has a good reputation for implementing relevant projects in dialogue with the people affected, and for basing their stands on knowledge and research.
- GMSL often succeed with the direct objective of their campaigns, though not always. In most issues where they did not succeed with their main goal, the efforts have had other positive effects.
- GMSL has been good on informing people about the immediate issues they work with. People on the ground had good knowledge and the information corresponded to a large extent with how GMSL presented the issues to us.
- GMSL is not well known. This is not a goal for GMSL either. Most of the activities take place in cooperation with others. On the ground it was mostly the local organisation (member or not member of GMSL) that was known. The people directly in contact with GMSL in the media knew GMSL, but not the other media people.
- The home garden project is very good and popular. The participants had good understanding of what they had been taught and emphasised most of the issues that are important to GMSL.
- The good understanding of and loyalty to the organisation's vision by all those involved is a major strength for GMSL. The network of organisations and individuals that work for and with GMSL is also a major strength together with GMSLs good reputation for accurate information and good knowledge of issues. The open and flexible attitude, encouraging initiative and personal growth is in line with the organisation's emphasis on grassroots ownership and participation.
- The backside of flexibility and freedom is usually lack of structure and routines. The organisation is very dependent on the knowledge of individuals. Lack of formal structure is also a weakness in dealing with internal conflict.
- Evaluation of activities to document successes and learning from mistakes is not emphasised.

Recommendations

- GMSL should give out more information about themselves during the campaigns, so that people know how to get in touch with them.
- Take more journalists to the field, promote GMSL more as a source of information.
- Evaluate the media work more formally and make an information strategy
- Be careful not to spread out to too many different activities. There are limits to holistic approaches.
- Use the opportunity of forthcoming planning sessions to look at practical, organisational issues.
- Not only focus on the political side and what activities to engage in.
- Do more project management methodology courses with staff.
- Create a system for overlap between staff and information storage to be less dependent on individuals.
- Reproduce the CO's style of human resource management (follow up of individuals) at middle management level to meet the challenge of a larger number of staff
- Do internal evaluations and project impact studies. Be more self-critical.

Comments from the organisation

Any evaluation is produced within a very limited framework with regards to the composition of the evaluation team, its time available, its access to information and how it analyses the information received. Furthermore, any social reality can be analysed and presented in many different ways, among which an evaluation represents only one. Hence while this evaluation report may be useful as a tool for general learning, it has limited value as a source of information about the particular projects and partners in question. We urge any reader to consult the partners involved or Development Fund before applying this information in a way that may affect the partners and the project.