MONITORING and EVALUATION (M&E)
Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of development projects are progressively more recognized as crucial management tasks. At times, donors and partners in implementation may not give much attention to monitoring by putting the whole responsibilities in the hands of the co-implementing agency. Many donors and implementing partners see as their sole responsibility to evaluate the on-going activities periodically. But, practically speaking both Monitoring and Evaluations are very much intertwined and cannot be separated from each other. Monitoring represents an on-going activity to track project progress against planned tasks. It aims at providing regular oversight of the implementation of an activity in terms of input delivery, work schedules etc.
Through such routine data gathering, analysis and reporting, program/project monitoring aims at providing project management, staff and other stakeholders with information on whether progress is being made towards achieving project objectives in terms of all the input. In this regard, monitoring represents a continuous assessment of project implementation in relation to project plans, resources, infrastructure, and use of services by project beneficiaries.
On the other hand, Evaluation represents a systematic and objective assessment of ongoing or completed projects or programs as a whole or as a portion in terms of their design, implementation and results and whether the expected output was made. Therefore, this clearly shows that it is not the responsibility of any particular agent either to do the evaluation or the monitoring.
If the role of monitoring is given to the implementing partner, most probably the monitoring reports the donor gets is very smooth and up to the plan. The situation changes, when the donor visits the field for evaluation and finds that the expected output was not made. This brings two confusions. The first confusion comes from the mistrust of the monitoring report. The second confusion comes from the hard yard stick of the donor for evaluation. That is why many donors and partner organizations opt to use an independent consultant to take the role of monitoring and evaluation in order to appease the working relationship between the donor and the implementing partner.
APPTODEV takes this role by either designing a new strategy to conduct the M&E or use the existing ways to do so in order not to waste much resources for making the necessary reviews in time without things fall apart or find that everything is on the right track on the right time.