Importance Of Ethical Dilemmas In Design, Monitoring And Evaluation

According the Church and Rogers (2006) “Not knowing what constitutes best practice is incompetence. Knowing what best practice is, but not knowing how to achieve it, may be inexperience. Knowingly not following best practices, when one knows how to achieve it, is unethical.” There are many ethical principles in design, monitoring and evaluation processes. The fact that ethical principles are deeply rooted in DM&E has made it very complex, whereas these principles are overlapping in different stages of design, monitoring and evaluation. Church and Roger talk about ethical issues that has mostly answered with right or wrong, whereas on the other hand ethical dilemmas does not have a clear right or wrong answer, therefore the decision on theses

Based on NGO regulations in Afghanistan all the money that enters Afghanistan for any purposes should be channeled through an Afghan organization therefore the fund to our project was channeled through an Afghan local NGO. At some point we learned that the NGO was asking its staff to change the data or materials to show that the project is successful. This action is clearly wrong and could come under the first “ethical issues” with right or wrong answer category. On the other hand, we had a very young monitoring and evaluation officer who was expert in the field and was tasked to monitor and evaluate the teaching method of professors in class, but due to cultural norms and values in Afghanistan we experienced a lot of ethical dilemmas because its culturally an adolescent voice is not

(Dugan & Bush, 2014) Knowing yourself and the client, building knowledge, experience and skills to mitigate the ethical dilemmas, and putting in place, mechanisms and processes to deal with emerging dilemmas are the three main strategies that can sharpen the “ethical compass” of evaluator, manager and client. (Dugan & Bush, 2014) Knowing yourself and your client can help The key ethical issues in program design are the consideration of risk and benefit, informed consent, confidentiality and ensuring safety. While conducting evaluation one should consider any harm that may cause from an evaluation and take steps to reduce them. Everyone who participates in the evaluation process should do it willingly. Finally the evaluation data should be kept confidential and the safety of the participants should be ensured. On the other hand the ethical issues related to evaluator roles could be feasibility, accuracy, propriety and utility. Evaluation should realistic and practical, the information should be collected and analyzed accurately and impartially, it should be legal and ethical and it should address important questions, provide clear and understandable results and provide significant