The Inclusive Development of the Economy (INCLUDE) Programme was jointly implemented by Ministry of Industry and German Development Cooperation (GIZ) from July 2008 till December 2016.

The aim of the programme is to improve the framework condition for socially inclusive economic growth in Kailali, Surkhet, Dang and Pyuthan districts. The special focus is on women, unemployed, underemployed youth, differently-abled people, conflict victims, ex-combatants, the illiterate jobseekers, micro, small and medium-sized entrepreneurs (MSMEs) and cooperatives in both urban and rural areas.

To achieve its objective, the programme implements its activities through various government, private sector (mostly Chamber of Commerce and Industries), or CCIs at district level) and cooperatives as its partner organisations.

The current Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) practices in INCLUDE Programme is carried out manually i.e. using standard formats and filled in by hand periodically or when requested by the management.

To reduce the effort of the partners, GIZ has planned to establish a holistic, web-based, open-source M&E system. In this context, the objective of the assignment was to undertake needs assessment of INCLUDE’s partner cooperatives to assess the types of data that need to be collected for M & E systems at partner level, identify information management system demand of cooperatives and assessment of their technical and human capacity to manage the system. The assessment also included institutional capacity assessment, resource mapping and resource flow analysis, management capacity analysis of the cooperative.

In undertaking this assignment, SW Nepal team carried out workshops in 4 programme districts. Based on this, the team prepared a workshop report elaborating on the types of data collected by the cooperative and their existing data collection tools and formats, proposed data to be collected and tools to be used, required technical specification for each data/information to meet the IT requirement of the lead consultant.

The findings of the needs assessment is designed to support the external lead consultant, Energypedia Consult, to develop web-based M & E system.