What is monitoring and evaluation?
Although the term “monitoring and evaluation” tends to get run together as if it is only one
thing, monitoring and evaluation are, in fact, two distinct sets of organisational activities,
related but not identical.
Monitoring is the systematic collection and analysis of information as a project progresses.
It is aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of a project or organisation. It is
based on targets set and activities planned during the planning phases of work. It helps to
keep the work on track, and can let management know when things are going wrong. If
done properly, it is an invaluable tool for good management, and it provides a useful base for
evaluation. It enables you to determine whether the resources you have available are
sufficient and are being well used, whether the capacity you have is sufficient and
appropriate, and whether you are doing what you planned to do (see also the toolkit on
Action Planning).
Evaluation is the comparison of actual project impacts against the agreed strategic plans. It
looks at what you set out to do, at what you have accomplished, and how you accomplished
it. It can be formative (taking place during the life of a project or organisation, with the
intention of improving the strategy or way of functioning of the project or organisation). It can
also be summative (drawing learnings from a completed project or an organisation that is
no longer functioning). Someone once described this as the difference between a check-up
and an autopsy!
What monitoring and evaluation have in common is that they are geared towards learning
from what you are doing and how you are doing it, by focusing on:
_ Efficiency
_ Effectiveness
_ Impact
Efficiency tells you that the input into the work is appropriate in terms of the output. This
could be input in terms of money, time, staff, equipment and so on. When you run a project
and are concerned about its replicability or about going to scale (see Glossary of Terms),
then it is very important to get the efficiency element right.
Effectiveness is a measure of the extent to which a development programme or project
achieves the specific objectives it set. If, for example, we set out to improve the
qualifications of all the high school teachers in a particular area, did we succeed?
Impact tells you whether or not what you did made a difference to the problem situation you
were trying to address. In other words, was your strategy useful? Did ensuring that
teachers were better qualified improve the pass rate in the final year of school? Before you
decide to get bigger, or to replicate the project elsewhere, you need to be sure that what you
are doing makes sense in terms of the impact you want to achieve.
From this it should be clear that monitoring and evaluation are best done when there has
been proper planning against which to assess progress and achievements. There are three toolkits in this set that deal with planning – the overview of planning, strategic planning and
action planning.
In this section we look in more detail at
why do monitoring and evaluation? and at more
about monitoring and evaluation and what they involve. This includes a discussion of
different approaches to monitoring and evaluation and of what to think about when you use
an external evaluator.
