Equal Access Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation Toolkit

This toolkit aims to help communication for development (C4D) organisations demonstrate the impacts and outcomes of their initiatives, listen to the people they are seeking to reach, continuously learn, and feed this learning back into their organisation and its practices. It is an outcome of the Assessing Communication for Social Change (AC4SC) project, which was a collaboration between Equal Access Nepal, Equal Access International, Queensland University of Technology, and the University of Adelaide, Australia. The toolkit was made possible through support provided by the Australian Research Council, Equal Access International, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)/Nepal.

The toolkit is guided by the principles of the communication for social change (CFSC) approach to C4D and participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E). It is based on recent ideas about effective evaluation and evaluation capacity development and learnings from the AC4SC project. The goal is to help C4D organisations become learning organisations that regularly critically reflect on their work.

Following an introductory section, the resource comprises the following modules and tools:

• Module 1: Effective communication, feedback and reporting systems in a PM&E process
• Module 2: Setting objectives and indicators
• Module 3: Research and PM&E methods
• Module 4: Critical listening and feedback sessions
• Module 5: Doing qualitative data analysis
• Module 6: Getting started and planning for PM&E and impact assessment
• Equal Access Community Researcher manual
• The Most Significant Change technique: A manual for M&E staff and others at Equal Access
• Useful resources, information and tools

Either the entire toolkit or individual modules can be used. The toolkit encourages practitioners to include as many people and stakeholders in their monitoring and evaluation work as possible. Its methods are largely qualitative; however, it encourages use of range of methods, including those that provide useful quantitative data.