M&E, Peace Corps style

Peace Corps is one of the most independent and self-directed jobs out there: you sign up, your program director sticks you in a rural town three hours from the nearest city, and you're expected to find some work to do. With such a modus operandi, you might be wondering, "So how does Peace Corps know you're actually working?" The truth is, they really don't, but since most volunteers have characteristics like altruism, work ethic, and passion for our jobs, this lack of accountability doesn't get taken advantage of too often. But there are a couple of hard checks in place to monitor what we PCVs are up to: yearly site visits by program directors, and tri-annual written reports.

As today is September 1st, it's that dreaded time of year: the VRF. VRF stands for Volunteer Reporting Form, and it is a tri-annual ritual generally abhorred by PCVs around the globe for its unwieldy and time-consuming nature. Every four months we each spend some serious hours filling in information about what we've been up to the last trimester: project descriptions, program goals met, and number of participants reached. The more numerical data gets aggregated for Congress/taxpayers through Peace Corps headquarters, and at least one member of the Lima office staff gets to read our narratives of challenges, success stories, and plans for the future. We do not report number of hours worked - in a job where 2/3 of your official goals focus on promoting intercultural understanding a timecard would be a bit beside the point. 

As much as we volunteers belly-ache every time we have to fill out a VRF, in reality Peace Corps' monitoring and evaluation framework is far from demanding (you can't complain too much about one report every four months). However, pulled by the increasing focus on metrics in the international development arena, with each passing year Peace Corps continues to move in the direction of more concrete M&E.