Reflections on the Changing Needs of M&E
I ’ve recently completed a number of missions for M&E purposes across Asia and the Pacific, and although there is always a sense of satisfaction of ticking the box on all of your deliverables, of knowing your client is pleased with the results, there is perhaps a greater satisfaction in what you can take away from each experience to build your own knowledge and try to use in your next assignment, to make development work just a bit more accountable and a bit… more. Measuring Innovation in Laos Nearly 10 years after drafting guidelines for the country office of an international organization on how to implement results-based monitoring and evaluation, I’ve discovered that a) not only have those guidelines been disseminated and used regionally, but b) they haven’t been updated (10 years!!??) and c) we’ve changed what we want to measure but not the tools we are allowed to measure the changes we effect with. Sigh.