The CRS Asia M&E Guidance Series

*Revised 2011

This series provides guidance for designing and implementing a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system. While the global standards represent the agency’s commitment to quality M&E as a key component of program quality, this series provides ‘how to’ guidance for operationalizing this commitment in practice. Each topic in the series includes its own set of standards (page 3), which emphasize the specific key messages and quality considerations relative to the topic. While the global M&E standards are high level overarching commitments, the standards in this series provide practical quality control considerations specific to individual components of an M&E system.

This guidance series is intended for programming staff at all levels including M&E staff, field staff, and project managers/officers, and highlights the role of each in multiple steps. The content of this series complements the information provided in both ProPack I (Stetson et al. 2004) and ProPack II (Stetson et al 200and references key sections of both documents. Staff should have a solid foundation in ProPack I and II in order to maximize the utility of this guidance.

The guidance is intended to be dynamic and to engage staff members in the critical thinking required to design and implement an M&E system. Each project is unique and good M&E practice will vary between contexts. For example, this guidance applies both to emergency and non-emergency contexts but sampling, tool content, and frequency of monitoring are all quite different in emergency settings than in non-emergency settings. What should remain constant in all contexts are the quality of the M&E system and the quality of the data it collects. Staff members should contact technical M&E technical staff (either in-country or regional) for support in implementing or discussing the guidance provided.