I’m Clara Hagens. I work for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) as the Regional Technical Advisor for Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning in Asia. I’d like to share with you a guidance document we have developed to support project teams to operationalize monitoring and evaluation (M&E) plans, big and small, in various contexts.
Rad Resource: CRS’ Guidance on Monitoring and Evaluation covers a range of topics related to basic M&E concepts and to designing and implementing M&E activities. The topics include gender in M&E, random and purposeful sampling, developing qualitative data collection tools, M&E in emergencies, and community participation in M&E to name a few. Each topic is grounded in a set of standards to guide our M&E practice. The standards are accompanied by narrative to explain how each can be achieved, tips and good practices, examples, and planning tables and templates.
For example, the Guidance provides standards for Community Participation in M&E that state that M&E systems track the changes most important to communities and communities participate in data collection and in the interpretation of M&E results and includes tips for each step in the process. The standards for Planning and Conducting an Evaluation refer to the importance of developing project-specific evaluation questions related to the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability. The Guidance also includes a simple evaluation planning table which helps teams to link the methods for data collection and respondents to the evaluation questions.
The CRS Guidance on Monitoring and Evaluation is appropriate for project teams who are looking for additional hands-on support to further engage with their M&E systems. I hope you will find this useful!
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.