Jan 18, Lecture notes by Heini

Jan 18, 2010 Lecture #1

PROJECT PLANNING

Development Project

- Relevance: who needs, what needs?

- Impact: continues afterwards, or not?

-> Sustainability

=> What are the real needs?

Beneficiaries/target group?

Who should define the objectives; plan the projects?

- Users?

- Stakeholders?

- Experts?

- Political instances?

- NGOs?

Objectives should be based on analyses:

- social, economical, environmental, institutional, technical etc..

-> Solutions can vary depending on who is looking the problem, the point of view

-> Without proper analyses the project may not be relevant!

How to make a result that continues after the project?

- Many development projects lack of sustainability

- The action becomes dependent on the project

- Development projects are usually long, 5-10 years, which affect the dependence

- Involved stakeholders, easily 20-30

- Within a community, there are always different subgroups and different needs

Planning should always begin from beneficiaries

- However, there are always those who don’t benefit

- Participatory approaches needed (though people don’t often know all possibilities)

o Good participation

o Understand the needs, but also experts can give alternatives

Objective definition: 3 levels

1. What are we aiming at? What would be the impact for the beneficiaries? Everybody should be involved the final idea.

- Different impacts with different interests, for example water: health, nutrition, agriculture, economic substances…

2. Immediate objective

- Operation maintenance system

3. Outputs (results): what kind of milestones during the project?

- Training, guideline manuals etc…

-> These will lead to immediate objectives

How do we plan a project?

- Analyze: what is the problem and what are the causes?

- Make it as concrete as possible on table!

- Project plan is a tool to implement the project

Remember: MONITORING

- Are we gaining the impacts?