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Toolkit: Scaling Up HIV-Related Legal Services
7. Monitoring and evaluation
WHY MONITORING AND EVALUATION IS IMPORTANT Monitoring and evaluation is the process by which data are collected and analysed in order to provide information to policy-makers and others for use in programme planning and project management. Reasons for monitoring and evaluating an HIV legal service include: 1 To capture lessons and learn from past experience, in order to improve the quality and coverage of services. 2 To ensure accountability to the communities served by legal services. 3 To know whether services are achieving their stated objectives and delivering the intended outcomes for individuals and communities. 4 To demonstrate results that provide a rationale for further funds to be allocated to scale up the services. 5 To monitor national progress of scale-up towards universal access to HIV legal services. 6 To collect data for use in advocacy efforts. 7 To ensure accountability to funders. MONITORING Monitoring of how a legal service is performing requires ongoing data collection to provide indications of progress and the achievement of objectives. Monitoring requires the regular tracking of activities and outcomes. Managers of a legal service should ensure that there are systematic ways to monitor service levels, service coverage and service quality. For example, data can be routinely recorded regarding: 1 Compliance with the recommended principles for ethical and effective legal services set out in Section 3 (see the discussion below on quality of services). 2 The numbers of clients. 3 The types of legal problems and how they are dealt with (including details of the courts, or other processes, that were used). 4 The number of hours or days required to manage and conclude each case, including the number of court days. 5 The client profile, including the client’s Monitoring and documentation of complaints and cases gender, age, membership of key population, post code of residence and Systematic monitoring of complaints received and cases handled (with consent) anonymous data on HIV by legal services can be a powerful advocacy tool. Services can status (kept securely and separately from document trends such as the number of cases of discrimination other data). or violence associated with HIV status. Complaints or cases can 6 Feedback received from clients about their be recorded in such a way as to not disclose the identity of the level of satisfaction with the legal service client. If consent is given by the clients, case studies drawn from provided. real life can be used for advocacy. Case studies can be highly 7 The number and nature of any specific effective in communicating the need for changes to discriminatory or unjust policies and practices, or for law reform. complaints or compliments received about how the service was provided. 36