Why Monitor and Evaluate

This brings us to the most interesting question compared to most questions you may actually have received, why Monitor and Evaluate? Why even bother? Why actually care at all? Well look at it this way, imagine you embarked on a project at home. You decide to plant a beautiful tree in your back yard devoting most of your time and energy to see that it gets the necessary care. When it starts to grow everyday you take a look at it to make sure the stem is just right, the leaves are healthy and it is flowering properly. If it doesn't appear to be growing you may ask yourself these important questions, Why is this happening? what can I do to correct this? What resources should I now put in it? In effect you are monitoring the plant to ensure that you achieve the intended results you are looking for.

Similarly, Monitoring and Evaluation aims to answer what change or effects or impacts has a developmental intervention achieved as a result of the implementation of a project or programme. In every project or programme there are outcomes, outputs, inputs and activities. Now, as a person responsible for monitoring and evaluating projects or programmes you will soon realize that your project or programme superiors have all these demands for results. Results doesn't mean your individual performance as an employee but in this case results means the intended or unintended change the project or programme has brought to its beneficiaries.Take for example, your project or programme wants to see its beneficiaries poverty levels reduce....the question you are going to ask yourself is how do you measure poverty? Ofcourse that wouldn't be a problem answering if the indicators had been well developed because at the end of the day that information has to be collected and adequately measured. So when poverty levels reduce then we say that a positive result has been achieved but when poverty levels increase even when a project or programme was being implemented then we say that there has been a negative result that has been achieved. You must understand that Monitoring and Evaluation provides the needed information to answer whether or not we are going to open that Champagne Bottle at the end of the implementation period.

But in this blog more information will be provided through the various articles on why Monitoring and Evaluation is actually the right way to go. So, stay tuned!!!!

0 comments:

Post a Comment

 

Copyright © Monitoring and Evaluation Design by O Pregador | Blogger Theme by Blogger Template de luxo | Powered by Blogger