The Basics of M&E for the Development Sector

In 2014, we had to work with a national non-profit working on improving health and hygiene among women in rural Uttar Pradesh. As a part of the project, tens of thousands of women were surveyed, and a sanitation plan was developed, and deployed. A year after the project, the sanitation plan was all but abandoned as there were no users, and local authorities did not find the resources to implement it at all. 

Looking back on this, the main thing that strikes us is: why did it take us a year to identify that the plan had been abandoned? What could we have done to identify these problems earlier on? 

Monitoring and Evaluation (or M&E as it is more commonly known as) has become a buzzword within the development sector in the past decade, and for the right reason. A culture of M&E would have gone a long way in avoiding the problem we faced. As a nature of our work, non-profits and social enterprises are immersed in transformative and innovative work. The burden of expectations, not only from donors & funders, but the community itself, is heightened, and demands results. All this results in an environment that can highly benefit from timely, planned, data-driven analysis of our innovations and its impact. Cue: a culture of learning, driven by M&E. 

What is M&E anyway?

Monitoring is the routine collection of data & information from projects to document progress, checked against the original plan. Information gathered from monitoring is used for evaluation. Evaluation is a process of systematically assessing a project, or a phase of the project to check for the impact of the intervention. 

This process should help you identify the health of your project, measured against the initial goals. The evaluation will determine the merit of the project or programme intervention, to identify any future changes and adjustments that have to be made. According to the OECD Network on Development Evaluation, there are six key evaluation criteria: 

Relevance: Does the intervention accomplish the right things?

Effectiveness: Are the objectives being achieved? 

Impact: What is the extent of the impact? 

Coherence: Does this intervention fit with other ongoing projects?

Efficiency: Are the resources being used efficiently?

Sustainability: Will the intervention last in the long-term?

Why is M&E necessary?

Like the anecdote shared above, almost every single person would have multiple examples of failed projects that would have succeeded provided the team noticed the telltale signs in advance. Monitoring and Evaluation gives you a strategic way of tracking the health of the program, and identifying critical problems early, so that you can adjust the intervention accordingly. 

Simply put, a robust M&E culture can:

• Improve program performance: Starting from needs assessment to the impact, a well-designed M&E will help your team develop a project with relevant, achievable, and measurable targets and interventions. 

• Improve resource allocation: M&E can facilitate optimized usage of funds & human resources, based on the health of the project, thereby avoiding contingencies and preventing waste. 

• Improve transparency & accountability: By tracking every phase of the program, you can collect significant evidence about the efficiency of the project to offer to stakeholders, community members, and donors. 

• Drive data-based decisions: M&E provides a path to collect significant amounts of quantifiable data about every phase of the project, which can be used to establish links between other projects, and strengthen future decisions. 

If your organization does not have an M&E process in place: now you know it is an absolute necessity. Once you have the systems in place, it is but a step further to cultivate an evaluation culture within your organization.