Why do a Nutrition Evaluation
Throughout the M&E (Monitoring and Evaluation) planning it is important to bear in mind why you are doing the plan- is it for reporting externally, publishing your findings, reporting to funders, trying to improve your project, understanding the needs of community better.
Project evaluations feed in to the project cycle and monitoring is a continuous process whereby findings adjust design. M&E can be considered as a circular process feeding into evaluation and learning. For assessing impact of the project on nutrition, it is necessary to understand the current situation, what your project aims to achieve and how your project plans to improve nutrition. The previous exercises will have helped to define this, ready for your M&E design.
The following exercises will help you design your own M&E system. Each project is different so you will have to decide what works for your context and for your particular project.
Participation of the communities and other stakeholders involved with the Permaculture project will be essential again. In practice, this means incorporating both participatory qualitative assessments and established defined indicators that are widely accepted, for example by donors. Again, we want to bring together technical expertise and local knowledge that is meaningful to the context. Having globally recognised and validated indicators might help build up evidence globally and for funders but these technical approaches should not supersede locally meaningful information.