Monitoring versus evaluation: the difference, with a project example

People often say "M&E" as one word, as if monitoring and evaluation were the same job. They are not. Both use data, and both help a project do better, but they ask different questions, at different times, for different readers. Mixing them up is one of the most common reasons a project collects a lot of data and still cannot say whether it worked.

Monitoring in one sentence

Monitoring is the routine tracking of a project while it runs. You collect a small amount of data, often and on a schedule, and compare it with the plan: Are the activities happening? Are we reaching the people we meant to reach? Are we spending as expected? Is anything going wrong that we can still fix this month?

Monitoring is mostly for the team that runs the project. Its value is speed: a problem noticed in week three can be corrected in week four.

Evaluation in one sentence

Evaluation is a deeper, less frequent judgement of what the project achieved and why. It steps back from the weekly numbers and asks bigger questions: Was this the right thing to do? Did it work? For whom? What would we change? Did the change last?

Many evaluations use the criteria commonly associated with the OECD's evaluation guidance: relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability. You do not need all of them every time, but they are a useful checklist for what a serious evaluation looks at.

Evaluation is usually done at a mid-point, at the end, or some time after, and it is often carried out or checked by someone outside the project team so that the judgement is independent. Its readers are wider: managers, partners, donors, and the communities concerned.

Side by side

The two feed each other. Good monitoring data is the raw material of a good evaluation. A good evaluation tells you which indicators were worth monitoring in the first place.

A small example

Imagine a literacy programme for women in a district. The plan has three parts: recruit learners, run classes, and measure reading ability.

Monitoring looks like this. Each month the team records how many women enrolled, how many attended each class, which classes were cancelled and why. The numbers show that attendance drops sharply in two villages. The team visits, learns that the class time clashes with water collection, and moves the sessions to the afternoon. Attendance recovers. This was monitoring doing its job: a problem spotted early and fixed during the project.

Evaluation looks like this. At the end of the programme, someone not involved in running it compares reading ability at the start and the end, talks to learners and their families, and asks whether the programme was the right design in the first place. The findings might say that reading improved, that the afternoon schedule helped, that women who could not leave home were still missed, and that the next programme should include home visits. That is evaluation: a judgement about results and a view of what to do next.

The numbers in this example are illustrative, not real data.

Where accountability and learning come in

MEAL adds two words to M&E: accountability and learning.

• Accountability means answering to the people you serve and to those who fund you. Monitoring data and complaint or feedback records are what you show; an evaluation is how you explain results.
• Learning means that findings change what you do. A report that is written and filed is not learning. A change to the next plan because of what the data showed is.

Seen this way, monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning are one cycle: collect, check, explain, adapt. You can read more in our guide to what MEAL is.

Common mistakes

• Treating monitoring as evaluation. Counting activities and participants tells you what was done, not whether it made a difference.
• Waiting for the evaluation to find problems. If a village stopped attending in month two, you want to know in month two.
• Too many indicators. A long list nobody reads is worse than five that the team looks at every month.
• No baseline. Without a starting value you cannot show change later.
• Data that never reaches a decision. Ask of every number: who will look at this, and what will they do differently?

Doing both in one place

In Pulseform each indicator has a baseline, a target and a direction, and its status compares your latest value with the target, which is the monitoring part. The same records, together with activities, risks and complaints, can be captured at one moment in a donor report, which gives an evaluator a clear starting point. See indicators and monitoring plans and the monitoring dashboard in the guide.