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Monitoring is more about people than about data, and processes matter more than technology.

Just like Wikipedia is not primarily about articles, monitoring is not just about data: It is the engagement of people that lies at the heart of both. The technology itself is not decisive, as engagement is stimulated by the right processes as much as by the technology: the barriers to participation must be low – both in terms of user-friendly software and organizational structures.

Our experiences from ten years of working for various projects show that a transparent and...

As of this month, I’m always on vacation – or never, depending how you look at it. I’ve left employment to start a branch of energypedia consult in Rwanda. In principle, I continue my job of the past years as M&E consultant specialized in IT solutions, just in a different country, context and position. In Kigali, I’ve created a group for entrepreneurs to help each other out including by monthly lunch meetings. At the beginning I was the one listening and scribbling notes during the entire meeting. But before I knew it, others, who are completely new to Rwanda, began to ask me...

It is a tricky issue: Every M&E trainers and every textbook on results-based monitoring encourages development projects to carry out their monitoring jointly with their political or implementing partner organizations. It makes intuitive sense: As you work on a project together, you will want to collect and share information on how things are progressing and together discuss success or failure in achieving results. On the practical side, you simply rely on your partner’s information. On top of that, it has a capacity-building aspect as well: Awareness for results (rather than mere...

When carrying out M&E consultancy or when building monitoring systems with our software WebMo for a client, I often get the request to make a direct link between activities and indicators. In these situations I explain that from a methodological perspective this is not proper practice: The center of results-based monitoring are – how else could it be – results. Activities are carried out to produce results. These are then measured and validated by indicators.

But in practice, I sometimes see that in results-based monitoring systems, results are simply skipped. The...