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London Regional Interest Group


Table of Contents

Welcome to the Homepage of the HEDON London Regional Interest Group, an informal grouping of people working in the Household Energy Sector in developing countries, wanting to meet occasionally in the South-East of England.

Here, you can find everything you need to keep updated on our activities and gatherings, both past and future.

The idea behind the meetings regional interest groups, of which London is the first example, is to turn the HEDON digital crowd into real people. HEDON is going GLOCAL! (global interests, local place).

LondonRIG is for anyone interested in household energy who:
  • Wants to connect with other people working in this sector
  • Wants to learn from others, and share own experiences
  • Wishes to meet a great group of diverse people!
  • Will be passing through, or available to travel to, London

[top] [end]Next meeting

When: Wednesday 29 October 18:30
What: Informal get together at the pub
Where: The Mulberry Bush, Southwark (89 Upper Ground, Southbank, London, SE1 9PP), London, UK streetmap or googlemap
Topic: Monitoring & Evaluation Part 2

In anticipation of the online M&E conference coming up in October, and to continue celebrating the newly introduced MandESIG on HEDON we will discuss Monitoring and Evaluation.... again.

The October LondonRIG meeting is sponsored by Eco Ltd - Grass Roots Projects, World Class Support - see www.ecoharmony.com

[top] [end]Previous meetings

[top] [end]London Regional Interest Group - Tuesday, 30 September 2008

When: Tuesday 30 September 18:30
What: Informal get together at the pub
Where: The Mulberry Bush, Southwark (89 Upper Ground, Southbank, London, SE1 9PP), London, UK streetmap or googlemap
Topic: Monitoring & Evaluation

Another lovely and informal evening in the centre of London!

In anticipation of the online M&E conference coming up in October, and to celebrate the newly introduced MandESIG on HEDON we discussed Monitoring and Evaluation. Kavita Rai from GVEP International briefly introduced the topic and stimulated.

Thanks everybody for coming and especially Om Kurmi from Aberdeen! Although conversation was lively and intense, we did not exhaust the M&E topic. It wasn’t expected either. In fact we barely got started. Grant Ballard-Tremeer, James Robinson and Raffaella Bellanca from Eco Ltd hosted the soirée. Sheilah Meikle? and Catherine Smith from Sunseed Tanzania Trust charmed us with stories from the field. In particular we got fascinated by the "Tree project" and the wonders of Mycorrhiza, a symbiotic fungus, which is used to increase plant growth. We were glad to have the valuable contributions of Ian Lobo from Accenture Development Partnerships and Ben Witchalls from BP. Finally we are very grateful to Kavita Rai for her interesting presentation. It was difficult to keep quite while she was talking, and people fervently took notes, and by the time she finished each of us had enough accumulated comments and questions to keep discussing for at least a month. We did what we could.... but far to soon we had to catch the tube.

Here is a draft summary of Kavita’s notes

1. Characteristics of a good M&E

It’s all about efficiency and effectiveness!!!
  • Monitoring is mostly short term, internal to implementing teams. Evaluation is long term, and could in most instances be external.
  • A good M&E system allows for the following to happen: mapping out the situation before, opportunities for development and changes, need for capacity building, comprehension of barriers and challenges, integrating changes into management and activities to achieve required outputs and impacts.
  • Very important to know ‘what’ are you going to monitor. Specific projects/ single technology projects
  • Are easy to monitor, but large ones or multi technology/multi regional are much more complex. Also, the longer the action, the tougher the choices as change are inevitable and tracking these changes could be a challenge.
  • Baseline is crucial. Mostly reconstructive if already not in place. Baseline for large, multiple, regional programmes can be expensive and costly. Thus, very important to focus on specifics.
  • Should have a clear methodology. Ensure that the data generated is well generated and utilised. Clarity of causal chain model used. Output based model (WB). For ex, if an output is satisfactory, subsidy is provided (ex, installation of SHS). But, if the impact you want to create is larger, say poverty reduction, then the indicators would need to be carefully chosen to make the model follow a more extensive model such as the Output-Outcome-Impact Model! In the former model, while income may not be a key point in data gathering, in the latter model, this is one of the most important baseline figures to be attained!
  • Good combinations of qualitative and quantitative methods need to be used. Methods should be straightforward to generate information (recording of units to quantify an indicator, sources of information etc are vital).
  • While structure is essential, flexibility is equally important but then you may lose the ‘flavour’ of the baseline! Also, what works in one area/region may not be the same in another. Flexibility is the key!
  • Another important factor is the ‘competency or skills’ required for conducting M&E. While ‘design’ is one, implementing is another! So, you might have a great design, but if implementing teams do not know what the design is, M&E could go awfully wrong.
  • Basic to any M&E is to define what the most important ‘criteria’ are. Many often get too wound up in defining long and extended list of criteria. I might suggest (with experience) that some basic criteria should be always kept constant such as the ones easily measurable that fulfils the objectives of the action/s. These could be ‘number of households served, number of equipments distributed etc.’. They also ‘need’ to be defined clearly. If the criteria are complicated and long drawn, the process may be tedious and information will be scattered (of course unless one has a huge budget and an army of personnel!)
  • Developing indicators - objective analysis, defining what to measure, quantitative/qualitative, positive/negative; SMART. Important to distinguish ‘outputs’ and ‘outcomes/impacts’!!
  • Indicators should not be vague. For example, ‘quality of life’. How do you measure such an indicator as it has multiple meanings! Would rather use the opportunity to ask beneficiaries/ stakeholders what this means. Is it increase in leisure time? Increase in income? Better communication facilities? Women making increasing decisions??
  • M&E is not only meant for ‘M&E’ experts but should be an ‘integral part of the project/programme’. This is often very hard to understand or put into practice!! All it means is that a plan needs to be designed, and each person needs to follow the individual responsibilities. The M&E person will then utilise these to make reports, advice changes.
  • Taking the above point, remember that M&E is not a ‘one (wo)man band’! Involvement of stakeholders is important and plays a critical role.

2. Important competencies that you may need to fulfil a good M&E.
  • Technical skills: Knowing the subject matter extremely well.
  • Interactive and knowledgeable in dealing with subjects, an accurate observer
  • Have some knowledge of both quantitative and qualitative data collection, processing
  • Have good planning skills
  • Good communicator/ facilitator: for feedback, influencing changes.
  • Should be willing to adapt to changes, addressing barriers/hurdles each step
  • Good recording skills!
  • Enthusiastic and positive

The September LondonRIG meeting was sponsored by Eco Ltd - Grass Roots Projects, World Class Support - see www.ecoharmony.com

[top] [end]London Regional Interest Group - Wednesday, 18 June 2008

HEDON Household Energy Network - LondonRIG get-together
When: Wednesday 18 June 19:30
Where: The Hoop and Toy Pub, 34 Thurloe Place, SW7 2HQ, London, UK (click for map)

It was a relaxed evening after the Ashden awards seminar. The Ashden awards for Sustainable Energy organizers supported us announcing the event in the morning and we were lucky to be honoured by the presence of some of the international finalists of the awards. Representatives of the ‘Gaia association’ project “Clean, safe ethanol stoves for refugee homes”, were there as well as of the ‘China, Renewable Energy Development Project (REDP)’ project “Bringing affordable, high-quality solar lighting to rural China”.

Local participants included people from organizations such as Climate Care and Carbon Aided so the issues of household energy, climate change and the carbon market were one of the topics of lively conversation. With Liz Bates, Jonathan Rouse, and Grant Ballard-Tremeer from Eco Ltd in attendance, Monitoring and Evaluation was also hotly discussed.

To get started we tried out a bit of ‘speed-dating’! Participants were divided in two groups and pared up. Each ‘couple’ had few minutes to introduce themselves to each other and thereafter brainstorm about possible ways of interaction between their organizations and ways they could potentially help each other. Immediately after, off they went to meet the next participant.

It seems that household energy affiliates are a fairly talkative crowd and it wasn’t easy to interrupt the conversations and proceed to next pairing. Although not in the orderly manner we had anticipated we nevertheless succeeded in following a sort of schedule and in the end could listen to the good ideas for cooperation that where the fruit of the exchanges.

The June LondonRIG meeting was sponsored by Eco Ltd - Grass Roots Projects, World Class Support - see www.ecoharmony.com

[top] [end]Launch of the London Group - Wednesday, 6 September 2006



On 6 September 2006, HEDON held its first ever London Regional Meeting. What a time we had. . .and, we’re quite grateful to Jamal Gore, of Carbon-Clear, who was brave enough to be the speaker for this new endeavour. Over drinks, Jamal discussed his company's participation in the voluntary carbon offset market via the funding of global activities. We learned an immense amount, a summary of which will be appearing very shortly.

In the meantime, enjoy the pictures of those in attendance, including:




Our speaker, Jamal Gore



From left to right, Jamal Gore, Lexa Laurance, Badri P Bastakoti, Liz Bates, and Erin Boyd.

[top] [end]Related topics

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Page created: 11 June 2008; Last edited: 01 October 2008; Version: 8
Knowledge Bank text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

Pagename: LondonRIG @HEDON: TRJA