What is evaluation?
Monitoring and Evaluation: The activity of monitoring the progress of a project and evaluating the project against some (pre-determined) criteria.
The UK Government defines Evaluation in their “Magenta Book” as:
– a systematic assessment of the design, implementation and outcomes of an intervention. It involves understanding how an intervention is being, or has been, implemented and what effects it has, for whom and why. It identifies what can be improved and estimates its overall impacts and cost-effectiveness.
Other definitions include:
– a structured process for assessing the value, merit, or worth of something. It involves gathering data to understand how something was designed, implemented, and what its results were.
– any systematic process to judge merit, worth or significance by combining evidence and values.
But, what does it mean in practice?
An evaluation can consist of:
- An analysis of:
- whether an intervention is being implemented as intended;
- whether the design is working;
- what is working more or less well and why.
- An objective test of what changes have occurred, the scale of those changes and an assessment of the extent to which they can be attributed to the intervention.
- A comparison of the benefits and costs of the intervention