Monitoring and Evaluation

These activities provide the Commission with hard evidence about how actions (projects/programmes) are implemented, to improve their design, efficiency and accountability.

Monitoring

Monitoring uses systematic collection of data on specified indicators to provide the management and the main stakeholders of an on-going intervention with indications of the extent of progress and achievement of objectives and progress in the use of allocated funds (OECD).

It can be internal (performed by Commission staff or implementing partners, such as agency’s staff, government’s personnel, other donors, non-state actors (private sector companies, NGOs, etc.)) or external (Results Oriented Monitoring).

Internal monitoring includes:

analysing action's reporting documents & data
attending action's steeringcommittee meetings & reviews of budget support operations
meetings/contacts with the action's team, beneficiaries, authorities, other stakeholders
on the spot checks

External monitoring (ROM)

This provides an independent view and focuses on problematic actions pinpointed by operational managers in their annual risk assessment exercise. It consists of a quick review, based on standard criteria, designed to give a brief snapshot of the quality of a project/programme and recommendations for EUDs/HQ services on how to improve it.

Evaluation

Systematic and objective assessment of on-going or completed interventions (actions/policies), their design, implementation and resultsaccording to the following criteria: relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, sustainability, impact, coherence and EU added-value.

It assesses how well a specific measure has worked (or is working) and whether it is still justified or should be changed.