Monitoring and Evaluation
Creativity and innovation are needed to find tailor-made and sustainable solutions for the complex challenges within social societies. However, in the international development cooperation, planned and expected changes rarely happen straight forward: Too many external factors affect the results of activities in the complex environments. Nevertheless, it is important to shape these changes in the best possible way. Monitoring is a fundamental tool to assess project results and find out why something worked well in one case and not in another one or why something didn’t go well. This is important to find the right path for sustainable development in similar situations in the future.
We offer support in form of consultations, training and coaching for monitoring. This includes
- Elaboration of (conflict-sensitive) results based monitoring systems
- Implementation of monitoring system and backstopping
- Collection and analyses of qualitative and quantitative data
- Develop necessary surveys and tracer studies to report to indicators
- Risk monitoring and monitorig of unintended results and external factors
- Report writing
- Analyses of monitoring results for learning and steering
Evaluation is – according to the DeGEval definition- a systematic assessment of the value and benefits of an object, such as programmes, projects, products and services they deliver. The results, conclusions or recommendations reached must be comprehensible and based on empirically obtained qualitative and/or quantitative data.
Our evaluation services include
- Formative, summative and ex-post evaluation (including central project evaluations)
- Evaluability assessments
- Participatory evaluation including relevant stakeholders (KOMPASS)
- Collection and analyses of qualitative and quantitative data
- Theory based evaluation, contribution analysis, outcome mapping, outcome harvesting,
- Cost-benefit analysis/ follow-the -money approach
- Integration of cross-cutting aspects (e.g. leave no one behind, interplay of social, environmental and economic aspects)
- Conflict sensitive approach (do no harm)
For both, monitoring and evaluation, we refer to the OECD/DAC criteria of relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability.
As members of the German Evaluation Society (DeGEval) we work according to their standards.