2134/29714
Leonie Postma
Leonie
Postma
A.J. James
A.J.
James
Christine van Wijk
Christine
van Wijk
QIS: a new participatory management tool to assess and act on field reality
Loughborough University
2018
untagged
2018-02-12 15:09:04
Conference contribution
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/conference_contribution/QIS_a_new_participatory_management_tool_to_assess_and_act_on_field_reality/9595043
One of the main problems to assess the achievement of the MDGs is the paucity of reliable data and statistics that reflect
field reality, especially of the poor. With successive waves of decentralisation, district authorities have been made responsible
for poverty and gender specific information on coverage, use and sustainability of water and sanitation services, at
community level and district levels. Participatory methods are essential to give all members of village communities the
opportunity to influence scores, and also to make informed choices during planning, and control quality of implementation.
However, such methods are time consuming and often generate qualitative information that is difficult to compare and
analyse at district or national levels. To address these problems, IRC developed, together with the Water and Sanitation
Program (WSP), the Methodology for Assessment (MPA) to assess sustainability of services and to generate gender and
poverty specific data. (Mukherjee and van Wijk, 2003). Based on the methodology, IRC along with AJ James has now developed
Qualitative Information System (QIS), which is a flexible system to store and analyse qualitative data for monitoring
progress and adaptive management at both project and community levels. Although QIS has the potential to contribute to
a more effective use of qualitative information, the challenges of preserving quality when using participatory methods as
well as the reliability of the data collected remain concerns to be addressed. The paper presents a number of key concerns
and introduces a set of criteria to ensure quality of both the participatory processes and the data collected.