Methodological Report Proposing a Monitoring and Evaluation Framework for the Urban Sector, Provisional Version

The report comes from the same mission as the note on a documentation base, with a shared preamble on the institutional questions of the urban sector. It starts from the finding that the PARAQ projects lacked an agreed way to monitor results: the European Union tried to set indicators, but without a common language and clear instructions to the operators at the start, the definitions differed so much that the exercise was difficult and not very reliable. A Technical Committee created in 2013 checked that neighborhood schemes followed the methodological guide for neighborhood rehabilitation.

The proposals are in three levels. Level 1 is operational monitoring of projects: it redefines the role of the Urban Planning Service (SPU) of the public works ministry in following urban planning documents, namely neighborhood schemes and communal development plans, sets out a plan of action prepared with the SPU, and discusses the role of the technical secretariat of the CIAT, which needs a common vocabulary and a minimum set of indicators for operators. Level 2 is a monitoring that feeds strategic discussion, with a method to set up an urban database and an urban observatory, illustrated with examples from Mauritania, Cameroon and Malaysia, and the precondition of a permanent framework for dialogue among institutions. Level 3 sketches simple indicators, on the model of those of the Climate Investment Funds, to show how far urban issues are taken into account in public policy and how quality of life changes.

The report says that setting up a monitoring and evaluation system in the current institutional context is premature, and that the work has to go on with the Haitian institutions together with the definitions and methods of the 11th European Development Fund urban program. It states that the Ministries of Public Works and of Planning account for 83 percent of public investment spending on urban development, and that urban planning documents of the previous eight years came from six or seven different public clients. An annex lists the available urban planning documents.