Principles of monitoring and evaluation help to provide the direction a project manager is supposed to follow when formulating a monitoring and evaluation system (M & E). Process of Principles of monitoring and evaluation lead to corrective actions during implementation of a project or program. Through these principles it becomes easy to know how evaluations are conducted, and helps us to determines determine the project plausibility, probability and adequacy of a project and process on how its objectives will be achieved.
Principles of monitoring and evaluation
7 Basic Principles of monitoring and evaluation are;
- Timely
- Adaptive
- Participatory
- Empowerment
- Focus
- Useful
- Simple
Main Principles of Monitoring and evaluation
1.Timely
M&E must be a timely process so that its easy to produce the results that can still be used for the purpose of improvement. Having a good timely monitoring and evaluation process gives relevance to the intervention itself. Building a timely monitoring evaluation program, must ideally start at the beginning of the project or an intervention.
2. Adaptive
A monitoring and evaluation program and intervention must be adaptive, ready to change as the challenges surface and remain focused during the implementation process. M&E is always about learning from the past experience and making comparisons on how to facilitate improvements.
Implementation of adaptive measures, makes the development plan and intervention easy to follow and change at any time in order to create a working strategy. Been adaptive creates a way to monitor indicators which may affect the project or program and make it difficult for data collection, and if in place managers may not the expected results.
3. Participatory
Participation in monitoring and evaluation serves two purposes. Participatory ensures the views and plan is shared among the stakeholders and beneficiaries of the intervention. Opens a way of different stakeholders to share ideas, collecting better results through participatory which are achieved. Participation empowers all people with different ideas and invites the stakeholders to join the project plan through the open sharing of information.
4. Empowerment
Empowerment in monitoring and evaluation is the process of assisting all project contributors and available stakeholders to achieve their full potential. Empowerment involves building people to the full capacity so they may effectively execute and help the project succeed. The process of empowerment, makes those that are ‘strong’ to be the helping partners for building the ‘weaker’ partner by helping them to grow.
Empowerment always provides the different kinds of support to the other contributors and employees working towards the fulfilling of a project. Gradually, this helps to establish the ways of which people can be helped to take on more responsibility, by empowering them with knowledge, technical know-how, information and equipment.
5. Focus
Focus is really important to the main stakeholders during the initiation of a monitoring and evaluation system in order to get the expected results. To ‘focus’ means those in charge of monitoring and evaluation must ensure the project intervention does not deviate from the original plan and if its archiving the intended purpose.
Focus helps them come up with the need to know the main objectives for the intervention, and what it is trying to achieve. Its important to remain focused during process of monitoring evaluation, because it leads to clear planning, creating useful documents for the stakeholders and avoid unintended problems which may surface in future.
6. Useful
Usefulness ensures M&E provides useful information for the different stakeholders which guides them on the relevance and direction of a project or program. Monitoring evolution has to be useful to provide information that is relevant and focus on the problems it intends to solve. Program collected must be useful for the intended conclusions, to the stakeholders and project beneficiaries that the intervention has come to improve.
7. Simple
Its important to always Keep the M&E system as simple as possible for the easy understanding of information, plan and procedures. The monitoring and evaluation should have a good, easy for managers to understand methodology and customize it for anyone to understand, not deviating from the context. It should always be simple for stakeholders to learn the project process and conclusions also how the evaluation process is going to be finalized. Simple in appropriate data collection for the project, it should explain basic information not too rigid.
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