Monitoring and evaluation

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is a process that helps improve performance and achieve results. Its goal is to improve current and future management of outputs, outcomes and impact. It is mainly used to assess the performance of projects, institutions and programmed set up by governments, international organisations and NGOs. It establishes links between the past, present and future actions.

Monitoring and evaluation processes can be managed by the donors financing the assessed activities, by an independent branch of the implementing organization, by the project managers or implementing team themselves and/or by a private company. The credibility and objectivity of monitoring and evaluation reports depend very much on the independence of the evaluate or evaluating team in charge. Their expertise and independence is of major importance for the process to be successful.

Many international organizations such as the United Nations, the World Bank group and the Organization of American States have been utilizing this process for many years. The process is also growing in popularity in the developing countries where the governments have created their own national M&E systems to assess the development projects, the resource management and the government activities or administration. The developed countries are using this process to assess their own development and cooperation agencies.

The M&E is, as its name indicates, separated into two distinguished categories: Evaluation and Monitoring. An evaluation is a systematic and objective examination concerning the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency and impact of activities in the light of specified objectives. The idea in evaluating projects is to isolate errors not to repeat them and to underline and promote the successful mechanisms for current and future projects.

An important goal of evaluation is to provide recommendations and lessons to the project managers and implementation teams that have worked on the projects and for the ones that will implement and work on similar projects.

Evaluations are also indirectly a means to report to the donor about the activities implemented. It is a means to verify that the donated funds are being well managed and transparently spent. The evaluators are supposed to check and analyse the budget lines and to report the findings in their work.

Monitoring is a continuous assessment that aims at providing all stakeholders with early detailed information on the progress or delay of the ongoing assessed activities. It is an oversight of the activity's implementation stage. Its purpose is to determine if the outputs, deliveries and schedules planned have been reached so that action can be taken to correct the deficiencies as quickly as possible.

...
Wikipedia