Each project may have different reporting requirements. However, overall, a good project report should meet several important criteria as follows.

Appropriate, clear and concise presentation. Ideally, a report outline, with specific headings and requirements, should be developed and agreed upon among stakeholders right from the project design stage, so that people responsible for reporting could apply consistently.

Any statement made should be accurate and sufficient evidence, either quantitatively or qualitatively, should be given to support those statements. For example, if a statement made in the report says “The project has successfully organized the training course and has raised awareness for 30 parents/caregivers on child protection”, then evidence on an increased percentage of people who have accurate knowledge about child protection, based on comparison of pre and post-training assessment results, should be given.

Comprehensive and logical analysis of issues and challenges during project implementation and actions taken. For example, if the report raises an issue of “The project is behind schedule”, it should explain why the project was delayed, what activities were delayed, what was the cause, and how it affected the progress towards achieving project goals and outcomes, what measures have been taken and what are the results.

First, each project should have a clear and detailed monitoring and evaluation plan. The M&E plan is developed and agreed upon by specialists, project staff, provincial managers, and MEL team as soon as a new project is approved.

Next, MEL team together with specialists and project staff develop monitoring and evaluation tools and implement monitoring and evaluation of project activities according to the plan. Finally, they synthesize, manage and process the results of monitoring and evaluation against the impact, outcome and output indicators of the project, at different times during the life of the project. These results are the evidence to include in the project reports.

Monitoring and evaluation is a regular and continuous activity of the project to ensure the quality of the project’s activities and results. Therefore, the information and data obtained from monitoring and evaluation activities are very important to include in the report. To increase the effectiveness of monitoring and evaluation activities, apart from ChildFund Vietnam staff, local partners also play an important role. ChildFund Vietnam is promoting the application of a participatory monitoring and evaluation approach to increase the participation and enhance the ownership of local partners in ensuring project activities’ progress and quality. ChildFund Vietnam’s Senior management team also promotes the improvement of knowledge and skills in monitoring and evaluation for the staff. Accordingly, ChildFund Vietnam project staff and local partners need to be trained to improve their knowledge and skills in monitoring, evaluation and planning, need to participate in designing tools, implementing monitoring and evaluation plan, and use the results of project monitoring and evaluation to improve the effectiveness of project activities.

Before sharing about how to analyze the causes and consequences of problems, I would like to share about the problems that were discovered. Project problems are understood as difficulties or challenges in implementing activities or things that need to be considered and resolved so that the project can achieve its goals. The same matter can have many problems, it is important that we identify correctly the core problem to come up with the right solutions.

For example, the report raised a problem as “Parents rarely participate in project activities, but mainly grandparents do”. This can be seen as a phenomenon rather than a problem. To determine the problem for this phenomenon, we can ask ourselves: what does the fact that parents rarely participate in project activities, but mainly grandparents do instead, lead to or how does it affect the achievement of the project goals? The answer may be “Grandparents are not fully able to take care of and protect children”. We can have similar follow-up questions to dig deeper. The final answer may be “Children are not as well cared for and protected at home as proposed by the project”. That is the core problem that we need to identify. Determining the correct core problem will help us do better cause and effect analysis and find better solutions, which in turn will bring many benefits to the project, including planning activities to achieve the targeted goals.

There are many techniques for analyzing the causes of and solutions for a problem. One of the quite simple and familiar ways is the PROBLEM TREE model. This model places the problem on the TRUNK, the causes on the ROOTS and the results/consequences on the BRANCHES. This technique was also applied during ChildFund Vietnam’s community consultation to develop a 3-year strategic plan in July 2022.

We need to have a clear understanding of the project targeted participants, project objectives and the expected changes that the project would bring to different target groups. These changes can be about knowledge, attitude, behavior, living conditions, social status, system operation, etc.

Success story writers will monitor and capture changes in target groups to select the most significant change cases and document them using text and images. This process should start early and continue throughout the project lifecycle.

In addition to disaggregating outcome and output data by gender, disability, ethnicity, etc. to include in the report, the strategies, efforts, and methods that the project has implemented to promote Gender equality, disability inclusion, social inclusion should be mentioned.

In the project report it is necessary to answer a number of questions:

• How has the project shown interest in promoting gender equality, disability inclusion and social inclusion in the design, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation stages?
• What efforts have been made and with what results, together with specific evidence?