Does your NGO or development organization need a new tool to manage its projects?

Thank you for your interest in Participatory Impact Monitoring. Just call it "PIM" - it's much easier!

PIM is designed to make self-help projects and organizations more successful by

Booklet 1 is written for leaders or members of self-help groups and describes how group-based impact monitoring works.

Booklet 2, on NGO-based impact monitoring is addressed to staff members of development organizations, i.e. national organizations such as NGOs, federations or government organizations which promote self-help groups.

- Do you need a monitoring instrument to manage your projects?

- Do you want to document the socio-cultural impacts of your work?

- Do you have to justify the success of your work perhaps because of some technical or economic error?

- Do you want to improve interaction between the self-help groups and your own?

- Do you need more information on learning processes within the self-help group and your own?

- Do you want more transparency in your organization and decision-making structures?

If so, why don't you read this booklet and try to implement PIM!

PIM is not a magic solution which works automatically. In fact, it only works if certain conditions are fulfilled. Please consider for a moment whether your NGO fulfils these conditions:

- Your team should be willing to promote people's participation, i.e. increasing the autonomy of the self-help group.

- There should be mutual trust and a desire to manage the project transparently by participatory impact monitoring.

- Your team and other organizations and individuals involved should be willing and able to accept changes in the project, i.e. to adapt your plans and contributions to people's needs.

- Your team should also be willing and able to invest a little time probably more than before - in monitoring. (You will then avoid wasting time on pointless activities.)

The self-help group should also fulfil certain conditions; they are mentioned in Booklet 1.

In PIM, two independent monitoring systems are regularly interlinked to ensure that the NGO really is supporting what the self-help group needs and wants.

Your NGO-based impact monitoring, which is outlined in this booklet (no. 2), should therefore be linked to the autonomous group-based impact monitoring described in Booklet 1.