Print Page: Word; PDF

We have identified what we believe to be important principles for M&E, and how STEPS can help you achieve them.

Contents

• Using a learning approach through self-evaluation
• Placing monitoring and evaluation within the program planning cycle in an ongoing way
• Engaging in meaningful stakeholder participation
• Using both qualitative and quantitative data
• A realistic approach to the time-frame for meaningful change

Using a learning approach through self-evaluation

• Focus on helping you continually improve the quality and impact of your work.
• Will help you answer the questions other audiences have, including stakeholders, donors and policymakers.
• Will be culturally specific and locally rooted to reflect the culture-specific nature of the long-term social changes that SRHR programs need to bring about.
• Will measure success based on how you and your stakeholders define success.

• encourages people from your own agency to design and conduct the monitoring and evaluation of their own programs.
• helps your agency build or strengthen a culture of evaluation that relies on targeted data collection and constructive self-reflection to continually improve its programs.
• will make it easier to integrate the lessons learned from monitoring and evaluation into program processes to capture progress on your agency’s long-term goals.
• helps you know how to use the findings to inform and improve your work, share with colleagues, and participants, and help build stronger SRHR programs around the world.

Placing monitoring and evaluation within the program planning cycle in an ongoing way

• Ideally M&E should begin when a program is being planned and carried out throughout the programming cycle.

• Monitoring and evaluation should inform new programs, make corrections along the way and design new approaches based on the findings.

Engaging in meaningful stakeholder participation

• Guarantees that definitions of success and strategies for reaching it are locally relevant.
• Ensures that the program is supported by staff, community leaders and other important stakeholders (i.e. politicians, donors, and colleague agencies).
• Provides new insights from people with diverse perspectives, which enrich your projects and the M&E process itself.

• learn how to inform monitoring and evaluation activities with the experience and needs of local stakeholders.
• realize that monitoring and evaluation will need to assess the perceptions of those the program is serving, since programs need to meet the needs of the local community and clients.
• produce findings that are of interest to broader sectors and that get more people excited and supportive of your work.

Using both qualitative and quantitative data

• Quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques answer different kinds of questions and each should be used when appropriate.
• Quantitative data are especially good at answering how much questions, but are not the only kind of data useful in M&E.
• Qualitative approaches are needed to:
  • Understand why and how changes occur or do not occur.
  • Ensure cultural sensitivity and relevance to the local context by helping you to understand local meanings of areas you have not explored before.
  • Identify people’s own perceptions rather than relying only on the perceptions of service providers and program planners.
  • Be able to explore sensitive topics such as relationships, sexual behaviors, personal attitudes or intimate partner violence.

STEPS helps users

• know when they should use quantitative and/or qualitative approaches to collecting data.
• learn how to construct quantitative and qualitative indicators.
• report their data through numerical and non-numerical indicators.

A realistic approach to the time-frame for meaningful change

• The changes that a social justice and rights based approach call for are long-term changes that take place gradually, over relatively long periods of time.
• Documentation of the logic of your program and a clear understanding of how your program will contribute to these long-term changes is essential to identify the immediate and intermediate changes you should be paying attention along the way.

STEPS helps users

• carefully plan and measure small changes that you believe will lead to the final results you are working towards.
• understand –and help others understand-- that change will take time, and therefore they should not expect final results immediately but be willing to follow the change process with you and monitor and evaluate how well things are going periodically.