Monitoring & Evaluation

Monitoring is the systematic collection and analysis of information as a project progresses. It is aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of a project or organization. It is based on targets set and activities planned during the planning phases of work. It helps to keep the work on track, and can let management know when things are going wrong. If done properly, it is an invaluable tool for good management, and it provides a useful base for evaluation. It enables you to determine whether the resources you have available are sufficient and are being well used, whether the capacity you have is sufficient and appropriate, and whether you doing what planned to do.

Evaluation is the comparison of actual project impacts against the agreed strategic plans. It looks at what you set out to do, what you have accomplished it. It can be formative (taking place during the life of a project or organization, with the intention of improving the strategy or way of functioning of the project or an organization It can also be summative (drawing learning from learning from a completed that is no longer functioning).

What monitoring and evaluation have in common is that they are geared towards learning from what you doing how you are doing it by focusing on:

Efficiency tells you that the input into the work is appropriate in terms of the output. This could be input in terms of money, time, staff, equipment and so on. When you run a project and are concerned about its replicability or about going to scale then it is very important to get the efficiency element right.

Effectiveness is a measures of the extent to which a developments programme or project achieve the specific objective it set. If, for example, we set out to improve the qualification of all the high school teachers in a particular area, did we succeed?

Impact tells you whether or not what you did made a difference to the problem situation you were trying to address. In other words, was your strategy useful? Did ensuring that teachers were better qualified improve the pass rate in the final year of school? Before you decide to get bigger, or to replicate the project elsewhere, you need to be sure that what you are doing makes sense in terms of the impact you want to achieve.

About SIMS:

How SIMS differs from CMIS?

Description of SIMS: