Monitoring and evaluation for people who hate spreadsheets

Monitoring and evaluation sounds like a compliance chore invented to satisfy funders. Done badly, that is exactly what it is. Done well, it is just the discipline of being honest with yourself about whether the work is working, expressed in numbers instead of hopes.

In Malawi we tracked things like harvest output, families fed, and the radius our irrigation actually reached. Not because a donor demanded a form, though one did, but because those numbers told us whether months of effort were producing anything real for the people we were there to serve. M&E was the feedback loop, not the paperwork.

The trap most organizations fall into is measuring what is easy instead of what matters. Activity is easy to count: meetings held, materials distributed, workshops delivered. Outcomes are harder: did anything actually change for anyone. The first set makes for a tidy report. The second set is the only one that should change your decisions.

My rule of thumb is to pick a small handful of measures that would genuinely alter what you do if they moved, and ignore the rest. If a number going up or down would not change a single decision you make, it is decoration. You are tracking it to feel diligent, not to be effective.

Good M&E is just intellectual honesty with a deadline. It is how good intentions find out, early enough to adjust, whether they are landing or merely comforting the people who hold them. The organizations brave enough to measure the hard things are the ones that actually improve.