These twelve insights into how to develop more effective monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems are important for those engaged in women’s rights and empowerment work at the grassroots, national, regional, and global level.
Many of these insights are endorsed by other recent work on social impact assessment by donors and development agencies. We believe these can be useful to the larger community of donors who support gender equality work.
- Make M&E a learning partnership, not a performance test
- Approaches that include multiple M&E frameworks / tools / methods are more effective
- Balance quantitative and qualitative assessment techniques
- Legitimize and value participatory approaches
- Track & assess reversals or even success in fiholding the linefl
- Approaches that assess contribution to change are better than attributionbased frameworks
- Make M&E systems flexible and adaptable
- Design M&E to suit organizational architecture
- Factor in organizational capacity when designing M&E
- Invest resources in developing M&E capacity
- Tailor indicators and results to time frames
- Invest in the creation of baselines
These insights have been gathered from AWID's intensive research into the challenges of monitoring and evaluating the progress of women’s rights work.