RE: Monitoring and evaluation: is this the perfect combination to meet the needs of decision-makers? | Eval Forward

Hello everyone,

Monitoring and evaluation are both important (in the sense that they are two different approaches that do not replace each other) and monitoring is important for evaluation (better evaluations are made with a good monitoring system). So they are two different but complementary approaches.

To come to the question of the means given to the monitoring system to benefit from quality data:

- It is very important to value the data producers and to give them feedback on the use of the data in the evaluation and decision making. This is to give meaning to data collection and to make decision-makers aware of its importance.

- One option for reducing costs is to rely as much as possible on users (farmers, fishermen, etc.) to collect data (instead of using only "professional" surveyors).

The last very important point is that the major challenge is the overall coherence of the system, because it is necessary to have motivated and reliable data collectors at the local level, and these data must also be partly comparable and able to be aggregated at the national level, otherwise we end up with a mass of local data from which nothing can be drawn at the supra-level. This work of articulating the scale, which consists of framing the monitoring system without "locking" local data collection into filling in indicators that they do not understand and that are not useful to them, is very important and constitutes the key skill that a national monitoring officer must have.

There is often a multiplication and overlapping of data collection and processing systems for management, monitoring and evaluation, whereas a system with shared relevance would be beneficial in many ways (think or rethink the institutional architecture for M&E).