NRN Self-Assessment Profiles
Poland
The National Rural Network (NRN) has been operational since December 2008 and has five full-time and one part-time team members. It is located within the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development in Warsaw.
As part of the methodology adopted by the NRN and within the Rural Development Programme 2007-20131 (RDP) for Poland, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) activities are defined. The more formal methods include specific criteria to evaluate the functioning of the Network and M&E indicators.
| Evaluation criteria | Indicators |
|---|---|
| Compliance of the activities with the Action Plan | The number of the Network participants at local, regional and national levels. |
| Timeliness of the exchange of information between Secretariats | The number of registered users of the Network portal |
| Universality of and easy access to the Network | The number of recorded entries to the Network site |
| Up-to-date information placed on the Network Internet site | The number of entries to thematic links of the Network site |
| Engagement of the participants in the Network activities | The number of participants of trainings, seminars and conferences organised under the Action Plan |
| Activity of the Network members on the Network Internet site | The number of trainings, seminars and conferences delivered |
| Compliance of the selected projects with the assumptions adopted for a given year by the Working Group | The number of publications |
| The level of interest in training sessions organised under the Network | The number of distributed publications |
| The number of thematic groups | |
| The level of interest in a given topic among the Network participants | The number of meetings of thematic groups |
| The number of projects, broken up by the topics (e.g., good practices, innovation, interregional cooperation) |
All activities undertaken by the NRN are based on activities planned for in the bi-annual Action Plan. Given the regionalised structure of the Network, the Action Plan is prepared by the national secretariat and the 16 regional secretariats of the NRN, in cooperation with the other members.
A Working Group (WG) has been set up to oversee and monitor the implementation of activities specified in the Action Plan. The members of the WG include representatives of public administration, local government and organisations and institutions engaged in rural development and they are responsible for creating and leading thematic initiatives.
The national and regional secretariats report on an annual basis on performance against the set-out objectives in the Action Plan, and highlight specific achievements and challenges met in the past year.
Standardised reporting on website statistics such as number of visitors, number of webpages viewed and access to the online NRN TV, is done by all the secretariats for their own websites. This sort of reporting is done annually and upon request.
The external evaluation of NRN activities
During autumn 2011 the Polish Network commissioned an external evaluation of its activities. The specific objective of the evaluation was to assess to what degree the Network structure was suitable and how efficiently and effectively the objectives in the Action Plan were achieved. The evaluation also compared the situations of three other NRNs (France, Italy and Lithuania) in order to identify innovative solutions for the rest of the programming period.
- Mid-term evaluation of the RDP for 2007-2013 [PDF
] - Mid-term evaluation of the RDP for 2007-2013 - Brochure [PDF ]
- Evaluation of the NRN [PDF ]
