Friends and colleagues often ask me why I enjoy anything related to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) so much. My simple answer has always been that anything related to assessment, such as M&E and accreditation, measures the quality of your professional skills and services.

Allow me to elaborate.

Customers trust in your professionalism and the quality of your services, making it essential to measure this quality accurately. This necessitates ongoing professional development to enhance your knowledge and skills. Indeed, accountability, accreditation, assessment, auditing, compliance certification, evaluation, monitoring, program reviews, and other processes are reliable methods for measuring the extent and quality of your services against the intended outcomes. Drawing from the statistical concept of Chi-Square, businesses rely on setting goals and objectives (expectations) and achieving them (observations). Comparing the two allows you to confidently claim a high level of efficiency and effectiveness in your service delivery. This comparison assists in decision-making, guiding you to the best path for further skill development and business visibility enhancement.

Another reason I find M&E so compelling is that it involves collecting evidence to support the alignment of three key elements. M&E reinforces the expected alignment between goals and objectives, feasible strategies to meet them, and valid assessment activities to determine the impact of those strategies on achieving the goals and objectives. It also establishes quality assurance that translates management transparency into accountability measures among practitioners, considering the expectations of program sponsors. As a change-driven approach, M&E is interdisciplinary, integrating methodologies from various fields to draw reliable conclusions on the impact.