Guide for Project M&E from IFAD

This Guide has been written to help project managers and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) staff improve the quality of M&E in International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)-supported projects. It focuses on how M&E can support project management and engage project stakeholders in understanding project progress, learning from achievements and problems, and agreeing on how to improve both strategy and operations. As identified in this publication, the main functions of M&E are: ensuring improvement-oriented critical reflection, learning to maximise the impact of rural development projects, and showing this impact to be accountable.

This Guide was developed with its potential users through a consultative process that lasted over a year. It attempts to address their practical problems, starting from their current M&E practices, however rudimentary, and whenever possible uses examples of good practices from IFAD-funded and other rural development projects. It is geared to the specific context, procedures and partnerships of IFAD supported operations. It emphasises participatory processes throughout, and proposes options that can be adapted to the requirements imposed by the management of projects in different regional and national contexts.

The Guide provides comprehensive advice on how to set up and implement an M&E system, plus background ideas that underpin the suggestions. It is organised in eight stand-alone modules that are tailored to the needs of different categories of users with specific yet different monitoring responsibilities and tasks.

Click here for access to the publication either online or as a downloadable PDF file.