Monitoring and evaluation (M&E)

Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is the combined practice of continuously tracking a program's activities and outputs, monitoring, and periodically assessing whether it achieved its intended outcomes, evaluation. Monitoring answers "is the program running as planned," typically through routine data collection such as attendance, spending against budget, or units delivered, while evaluation answers "did the program work," often at defined milestones or at the end of a funding cycle.

Most M&E systems are built around a logic model or theory of change that maps inputs and activities to outputs, outcomes, and longer-term impact, so that indicators tracked in monitoring line up with the outcomes an evaluation will later test. This differs from impact evaluation specifically, which is one type of evaluation focused narrowly on isolating a program's causal effect against a counterfactual, rather than the broader ongoing tracking that M&E also covers.

Funders, government agencies, and NGOs rely on M&E to justify budgets, catch implementation problems early, and decide whether to continue, adjust, or end a program, and it is the framework most program evaluation work sits inside, including work tied to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicators. A common pitfall is collecting output data, such as workshops held or materials distributed, without ever connecting it back to outcome indicators, which produces a monitoring system that looks active but cannot answer whether the program is actually succeeding.