Governments are increasingly bound to demonstrate policy results. Policy makers and stakeholders are not only interested in whether activities and actions have taken place and to what extent, but also in the actual outcomes derived from such interventions. Comprehensive results-based M&E systems can help to investigate whether a certain project, programme, or policy1 has actually led to the desired medium- and long-term results they were initially designed to achieve (Kusek and Rist, 2004[9]). An M&E system can also provide information on how progress towards those achievements has taken place and identify any challenges that may have arisen in the process. Overall, it generates feedback on the actual outcomes of government actions and can provide an answer to the following questions: i) what are the policy goals?; ii) are they being achieved?; and iii) how can this achievement be proved?.
The wealth of information provided by a functioning M&E system is useful for both internal and external stakeholders. Internally, an M&E system is an essential public management tool that can help policy makers to track progress and demonstrate the impact of a particular policy or intervention. But M&E results are also important to the public, who are interested in the impact from their government’s actions and who are expecting certain results from those actions. A well-built M&E system can help in clarifying and articulating policy goals, identifying promising practices, and even detecting programme weaknesses and potential actions to correct those weaknesses. As a result, M&E systems are a crucial tool to promote transparency and accountability of policy making.
Monitoring and evaluation are separate but complementary functions (OECD, 2002[10]). While monitoring is a continuous and mainly descriptive function that provides information on where a policy stands in terms of actions delivered and its derived products or outputs, evaluation, on the other hand, aims to provide responses to why and how certain outcomes have or have not been achieved. For example, if a monitoring system shows that certain indicators are following a particular pattern (i.e. the target population is not getting access to a service of interest), then an appropriate evaluation exercise should help clarify the trend noted through the monitoring system (i.e. potential explanations for low service uptake). If stakeholders were to look at trend data solely, without considering the context and other insights provided by the evaluation function, they would risk reaching incorrect conclusions about the effects of certain interventions. Therefore, a robust M&E system must be built considering the relevance and complementarity of both functions.