M&E

Indicator development can be quite a challenge and far too often, no M&E expert is involved in this process. Consequently, M&E staff often has to work with difficult indicators. Based on my experience as an M&E consultant, in this article I give some examples of tricky indicators and make suggestions on how to report and present their progress.

Ideally, an indicator should cover only one aspect. In that case, it is easy to display its progress in a chart, because there is a clear and unidimensional progress trajectory. For example, if the indicator says "Three...

You’re thinking about using IT tools for your monitoring system? Then consider the following three points before taking a decision:

1. File-based IT approaches have the disadvantage that data and information is often scattered across different documents with several versions circulating for example via email. Access to the latest information can be difficult within a team. It needs a person who is responsible to consolidate all information...

Are you a beginner with monitoring and evaluation (M&E) or starting a new project or program in the development sector? Then you will probably also think about IT tools, how and where to use them. There are plenty of tools and software out there. Getting an overview is not an easy task.
But wait, before spending your time researching for tools, go a step back and ask yourself if you really need IT tools at all for your M&E system. It may sound a bit heretical since everything nowadays is IT supported. However, it makes sense to be aware of some of it shortcomings. For...

In the first week of August, I attended the MERL Tech in Johannesburg, where the tech community in the Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning space met for an intense two-day conference. I was given the opportunity to present our software WebMo for Monitoring and Collaboration as well as host a session of our unique “The Wikipedia Approach to Monitoring”. However, it turned out that my role at that conference had more faces: As much as I’m a developer of WebMo – I’m also a consultant. In my work I want to make sure that anyone approaching me on the subject “IT for M&E” gets...