Camino Verde’s Peer-to-Peer Monitoring in Guerrero

Herminio Mejía Mozo, facilitator, and two CIET researchers interview an Acapulco brigadista during the peer-to-peer monitoring carried out in August 2011.

Peer-monitoring involved visits from facilitators and brigadistas of one community to another. It has two parts.

Most significant change

The first part was an exercise to ask participants to identify the most significant change they have observed since the intervention began. In each intervention site, facilitators from another site interviewed members of a sample of households reached by the project, a sample of brigadistas and the site facilitator. The visiting facilitators asked what changes they had perceived in their homes and their community as a result of the project. If the interviewees mentioned more than one change, they were asked which one they considered to be most important and why. The process was coordinated by CIET staff not otherwise involved with the trial.

The question about any change derives from a technique which seeks to determine the “Most Significant Change” (MSC) perceived by different project participants (Dart J, Davies R.. A dialogical, story-based evaluation tool. American Journal of Evaluation 2003, 24(2), 137-155). The technique interested us because it can be put to use quickly and cheaply, can be applied to a complex project, focuses on social change from the actors’ perspective, and helps to sharpen capacities for evaluation and reflection at different operational levels of the intervention (brigadistas, facilitators, local administrators and researchers responsible for the project).

In a pilot MSC round interviews were analysed at three different levels. First, facilitators read all the narrations and selected those which they found to contain the most important changes. Then, six CIET members (three of them involved in the dengue project, and three others who were not active participants), read the narrations chosen at the first level and narrowed down the selection. Finally, a group of people who did not belong to CIET’s group in Mexico, but who worked or collaborate with CIET, analysed the narratives selected at the second level. In this case, the group considered that it was not possible to choose one particular testimony without leaving out changes that were important to the project; therefore, they decided to produce a synthetic report based on all the narrations selected at the second level. These testimonies allowed the Camino Verde dynamics and their impact on the communities to be appreciated from the perspectives of the project’s various protagonists.

Monitoring for the presence of mosquito larvas and pupas

In a second round of monitoring the MSC process was combined with peer monitoring of water receptacles in the households for the presence of mosquito larvas and pupas.

The visiting brigadistas ask seven questions:

  1. Have you been visited by a Camino Verde brigadista?
  2. When was the last time they visited?
  3. Did the brigadista find any larvas or pupas in your household on their last visit?
  4. What changes have you seen since the Camino Verde brigadistas have become active in this community?
  5. Among the changes that you mentioned [read them aloud], which one do you think is the most important?
  6. Why is it the most important?
  7. Do you have any recommendations for the Camino Verde brigadistas that would improve their work?

Then the visiting brigadistas conducted their own check of the household for the presence of mosquito larvas or pupas and note the results.

At the end of the same day the visiting brigadistas met with the neighborhood’s leaders and Camino Verde brigade to provide feedback on:

  • the physical evident of what they found and where it was found
  • the recommendations given by the householders for their SEPA brigade.