Bhubaneswar: The Poverty & Human Development Monitoring Agency (PHDMA), an autonomous body under the Planning and Convergence Department, through its continuous efforts and grassroots-level initiatives has proven its role as a leading government agency to monitor policies and their translation at the people level. PHDMA’s monitoring, evaluation and documentation (MED) has also won accolades from top agencies like NITI Ayog for its pragmatic and citizen-centric approach.
PHDMA’s approach towards M&E has gone a sea-change in last 4 years with the adoption of narrative-based and sense-making M & E along with focusing on visual anthropological documentation of the realities.
In its endeavour, PHDMA attempts at using new age tools for understanding and presentation of reality that can assist and empower policy makers towards addressing issues that exist unique to Odisha. In an increasingly globalised world, the organization uses pan-world practices with local contexts to help policymakers find out modern solutions to perennial problems existing in the state.
Ecosystem Approach:
In the journey of last four years, PHDMA’s collection of narratives using the “Mycelium Way” of listening to what’s underneath, illustrates a true reflection of the governance model in Odisha. These reports are provided to various departments and stakeholders concerned for necessary policy action. Each report provides a policy input. In the process, the endurance to see realities from the grassroots and make them seen has become a priority and the narratives as a tool to understand the socio-political-economic ecosystem of the state has come to the fore. For each beneficiary, his/her narrative is the reflection of the realities collected by Team PHDMA through the specialised techniques of deep listening and immersion.
Major Tasks:
In its continuous monitoring and narrative-based evaluation, PHDMA has travelled across the lengths and breadths of Odisha touching upon every nook and cranny by making more than 500 trips to districts, blocks and gram panchayats, and covering over 5,00,000 km. The young professionals have touched upon more than 20,000 lives during the M&E processes, gathered over 5,000 oral narratives, made a repository of more than 10,000 visuals, documented and disseminated around 3,000 stories through a series of knowledge products in the form of narrative books, visual compilations and online stories.
Besides, PHDMA has formed a vast network of Gram Panchayat (GP) level officers such as, PEO, GRS, AWW, VAW, RIs, JEs, and others from all the 6,798 Gram Panchayats of Odisha. These functionaries have been onboarded and trained to be the “Voice of PHDMA (VoP)”. The VoPs are in true sense, ‘ears and eyes’ of PHDMA on the ground in the field-focused, people-centric monitoring and narrative-based evaluation process.
Labs for Narratives:
The PHDMA narratives are data points that are used as policy inputs. It has got a Narratives and Lived Reality Lab with the nomenclature “Prarambha Lab” which monitors, evaluates and documents human development through people’s own experiences and stories. It also has got a Visual Anthropology Lab named “Frame tells a Tale” that monitors, evaluates and documents human development through visual and video means. The documentation process is not schematic in nature; rather it sees lives of people through the convergent efforts of government. Besides, a Data Sensing Lab with the nomenclature “Sankhya Lab” is also a dedicated space within PHDMA which monitors, evaluates and documents development through analysing global, national indicators, building compendium of data as well as house its own data collection system.
Through these labs, PHDMA has done some prominent works like continuous monitoring in Puri, Khurda, Nayagarh, Sambalpur, Angul and Deogarhdistricts to observer convergence of household-based schemes and collected narratives and grievances, documented tribal welfare schemes and interventions through ITDA projects, conducted climate change study in Kendrapara and Nayagarah, evaluated the food security measures, assessed impact of welfare initiatives in Swabhiman Anchal, pictorially documented schemes and themes through frame tales, five newsletters on COVID with Unicef, growth trajectory in Kalahandi and capacity building workshops, among others.
PHDMA also took part at the National Conference for Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (NCEML-2024) organized by the Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO), NITI Aayog, and presented the qualitative monitoring methods adopted by the agency for impact analysis with a perspective that brings out the lived realities of people at the ground across Odisha, which include both the beneficiaries and cutting-edge functionaries. It was appreciated by the national body.