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About the webinar

Once an M&E System is in place, it is important to regularly measure the performance of the System itself to ensure that it continues to deliver the high quality data required to evaluate whether a project or programme is achieving its desired results.

This webinar provides practical guidance to M&E practitioners on how to assess an M&E System.

We identify the key questions for measuring the effectiveness of the system and identifying gaps.

We explore some considerations for conducting an assessment at various scales, from project to national-level M&E systems.

Finally, we also share some measures you can adopt to strengthen your system based on the findings of your assessment, with some useful resources to get you started.

In summary, we cover:

• Why conduct an assessment of your M&E System?

How to conduct an M&E System assessment?

• Determining the scale and scope
• Roles and responsibilities
• Assessment methods and tools
• Assessment outputs

What to do following an assessment?

• Monitoring progress
• Making the case for investing in strengthening initiatives

View the presentation slides of the Webinar.

Is this Webinar for me?

• Are you an M&E Manager who has been tasked with strengthening an existing M&E System for your project, programme or organization? Or are you developing a new M&E System and you want to make sure it meets the minimum standards for effective systems?
• Do you wish to know more about how to go about assessing M&E Systems on a practical level?

Then, watch our Webinar!

Questions and answers

How would you describe the difference between an M&E system assessment and a Data Quality Assessment? It seems like the components are interdependent?

Data Quality is one domain of an M&E System. While an M&E System Assessment looks at the effectiveness of the system as a whole, a Data Quality Assessment looks at a specific data set to determine whether the data can be reliably used for its intended purpose.

What is the best time in a project's lifecycle to conduct my M&E system assessment?

It is recommended to do an assessment at the start of your project to measure baseline performance. And then conduct a reassessment every year to ensure that any issues are addressed and improvements are implemented in a timely manner.

Do you have any suggestions for choosing the best mix between document review, interviews, surveys and sample sizes?

The mix of methods will depend on the scale of your assessment. In general, the larger the scale, more value will be added by incorporating more methods, especially more quantitative ones like surveys.

What are the major roles for M&E staff during the assessment?

The M&E Manager (i.e. the person who is accountable for the successful implementation of the M&E System) will lead the assessment. Other M&E Staff will provide data to support the assessment as relevant.

What happens when you conduct a baseline assessment and find that there are no gaps or challenges, but then discover at the end of the program that the targets or desired changes were not achieved?

If there were no gaps identified in the M&E System Assessment yet program targets were not realized, there could be an issue with the program design itself rather than with the M&E System. This is where a Program Evaluation will need to be conducted to uncover the reasons for missing targets.

For a short-term project, can we complete this entire process, even if the project is not anchored in an organization?

Yes, an assessment can be done at the scale of an individual project. One would simply need to focus the data collection and analysis on the system components relevant to that project.

About the Presenter

Jeric Kison earned his Bachelor's Degree from York University in Canada and his MBA from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. He has worked with NGOs and governments across four continents on strategy and evaluation for nine years. Before joining ActivityInfo he worked as a Monitoring & Evaluation Officer at Pilipinas Shell Foundation, Inc., where he led a project to develop an organizational M&E System which included the roll-out of ActivityInfo as the organization’s new information management system. Today, Jeric is working as a Customer Success Director in the ActivityInfo team bringing together his experience on the ground and passion for data to help our customers achieve success with ActivityInfo.