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Getting Started on M&E
February 17, 2021
Monitoring and Evaluation
Considering monitoring and evaluation?
Monitoring and evaluation can be a powerful tool for social and political change. It can assess your impact, help you make informed decisions, motivate your stakeholders, influence policy makers, and contribute to delivering positive results.
Although M&E is often perceived as daunting, Arco is here to help you with your first steps.
Where to start
The M&E you conduct must be relevant, useful, timely, and credible. It is important to decide and prioritise the programmes/projects you want to monitor (as it is unlikely you will have the resources to monitor all your activities effectively at the same time); over what time period; and whether it is an on-going activity which requires monitoring or a completed activity which requires evaluation.
Who to involve
To ensure M&E is relevant to your stakeholders it is important that you consider their information needs, as well as your own. You will therefore need to identify the key internal and external stakeholders and decide how to involve them in the design, implementation, analysis and/or communication of findings.
Examples of people you might want to include are:
People directly involved in your projects e.g workers on the ground
Stakeholders in your target community (this is your community of interest) e.g. specific networks, businesses or community groups
External stakeholders e.g. advisors, policymakers, we’d highly recommend you bring in a statistician.
Decide on the key issues you want to investigate and which resources you may need
Identify the issues and questions you wish to learn about, and hence monitor. Make a list of objectives, an overarching vision of what you want to achieve, and a list or resources you may need.
For example:
Management: you’ll need clarity around aims, objectives, roles & responsibilities.
Resources: human, technical, financial.
Sustainability: important to consider if this will have a long runway to completion.
Identifying what information you need to collect
Generally, you are likely to need information to:
Track and assess what has changed (both intended and unintended);
Understand the reasons for changes - i.e. what factors/organisations/individuals have facilitated/constrained change (including your contribution);
Interpret the changes i.e. people’s perceptions and experiences of change.
The information you collect might either be:
Quantitative information expressed in numerical terms as numbers and ratios for example. This information will allow you to answer ‘what’, ‘how many’ and ‘when’ questions.
Qualitative information is expressed through descriptive prose and can address questions about ‘why’ and ‘how’, as well as perceptions, attitudes and beliefs.
Indicators
If you want to track intended changes resulting from your programmes or projects you will need to identify indicators. These are specific and concrete pieces of information that enable you to track the changes you are trying to achieve.
Survey design
Crunch time. By this stage you have a clearer idea of what you want to achieve. Now it’s time to bring in the extra help. Survey design and question wording is vital to getting good data. Without getting professional advice before commencing, you risk wasting time and resources or being led astray by incorrect information.
This is where Arco or another service provider can help with a workshop, where we’ll brainstorm potential survey questions and decide how you to collect the information.
Check out this video to get an idea of what we’re referring to:
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