Posts tagged ‘m&e’
New e-learning course: cutting edge M&E
A new e-learning course is available from TRAASS international ; Cutting-Edge M&E: A Guide for Practitioners. The course is taught by Colin Jacobs, a senior trainer with more than 25 years’ experience in international development. Colin’s recent roles include President at the UK Evaluation Society and Head, Governance and Civil Society at British Council.
This online course lays the ground for Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) to make vital contributions to incentivising change and measure performance. The course considers challenges in current M&E practice, introduces a tool-box of evaluation techniques and shows where these can be best applied. Ways of promoting early participation and the engagement of key stakeholders are explored and a step-by-step action plan to improve practice of M&E is provided. Further information>>
Full disclosure; I also present an e-learning course for TRAASS International; Effective and creative evaluation report writing.
From broad goals to specific indicators
No doubt you have heard of the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), eight broad goals on poverty, ill-health, etc, agreed upon by all countries to try and reach by 2015.
From a monitoring and evaluation point-of-view, what is interesting is that these goals are broad sweeping statements, such as:
Goal 1: Eradicate Extreme Hunger and Poverty
Goal 3: Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women
One could ask – how can these broad goals be possibly monitored and evaluated?
As detailed on this MDGs monitoring website, what has been done is to set specific indicators for each goal, for example:
Goal 3: Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women
Description: Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015
Indicators:
3.1 Ratios of girls to boys in primary, secondary and tertiary education
3.2 Share of women in wage employment in the non-agricultural sector
3.3 Proportion of seats held by women in national parliament
So from broad goals, the MDGs focus on two to seven specific indicators per goal that they are monitoring. That’s an interesting approach, as often we see broad goals set by organisations and then no attempt made to actually detail any indicators.
the MDGs monitoring website plays an active role in monitoring these indicators combining quantitative data (statistics) and qualitative data (case studies) – also an interesting approach to show how such indicators can be tracked.
Glenn
intelligent measurement 