Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E)

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is a creative, conceptual and data-driven endeavour. It allows organisations and programmes to visualise their objectives and goals, and map the expected pathways or routes to changing a set of circumstances, conditions or intended outcomes. It helps to identify factors that may perturb, influence or ‘confound’ efforts at achieving change, as well as enabling factors (or ‘enablers’) that support the journey to move forwards. It allows those overseeing processes or programmes intent on achieving changes from a current baseline through the interim stages to the end goals. Through the use of indicators and empirical evidence that measure interim and final accomplishments, and truthful accounts of the process, it enables the tracking of progress along the route to change. It facilitates the identification, analyses and understanding of how the change/changes will be, is being or has been achieved, and draws out learning for the future. It also enables evaluation of the quality, quantity or other measures of the success of a programme, whether it will or has met its goals and ultimate impact.

Most M&E programmes consist of an initial theory of change, a conceptual theory or vision of the problem to be solved that helps tell the story of how change should be accomplished, the main objectives and goals, potential routes to that outcome, the inputs (activities), and barriers/enablers to change and what the outcomes should look like. It is accompanied by an M&E framework, a set of measures, metrics, and a strategy for data collection or acquisition – both quantitative/statistical data for context of scale and qualitative data for depth of perspective and understanding, that will provide evidence of programme outputs and outcomes, impacts and achievement of the final goal. Another key instrument is a log frame, a record of all the measures, metrics and empirical evidence to be collected at different points along the timeline from programme inception to programme completion.

M&E practitioners understand that change processes are rarely linear but can often resemble complex systems or mini ‘universes’ of pathways that sometimes run parallel and often don’t, but criss-cross or intersect at particular junctures or nodes. A common goal in contemporary M&E is providing theories of change which are responsive and adaptable in the light of the complex and unpredictable world we live in. M&E frameworks need to be modifiable so as to fully capture unexpected occurrences or slides away from the originally envisaged change process. However, they need to remain consistent enough to an original baseline so as to provide a meaningful analysis of what has developed or been accomplished since it was measured.

I have peer-reviewed terms of reference, evaluations and third party monitoring on the following programmes:

Reviewer Specialisms: ethics and safeguarding, integration of gender equality, disability and social inclusion, human rights approaches, bias, free, prior, and informed consent, non-text-based consent methods, socio-cultural context, media and communications for development, creative and co-design methods.