Implementing your M&E

Once you have selected the appropriate measures and indicators you will also need to determine which tools are most useful to track progress against these.

When choose your tools, remember:

• Ensure that the data collection tools can generate data that responds to the indicator. You may need to include more than one question or metric to do so.
• In instances where the project is not collecting primary data, you will need to assist the project team in identifying the secondary data sources (e.g. media reports, social media content).
• Collecting data: Depending on the environment you may need to collect data using paper-based approach, electronically or through secondary sources. This should be discussed with the project team to assess what systems they may currently access or have skills to use.
• Collating data: Create a database (e.g. MS Excel on SharePoint) for the project to collate data collected. This should allow them ease of summarising all indicator data by relevant disaggregation (e.g. time, location).
• If the project is sourcing unstructured secondary data you will need to format the dataset or look at ways of structuring the data (e.g. codifying multimedia data).
• Cleaning and analysing your data: You should allow for time to support your project teams to check for data inconsistencies and understand the quality of data that is being collected.

The above is important to ensure that the data you use to measure progress against your indicators are of good quality. The toolkits under this section will provide you with different ways of collecting data to measure and track progress against your indicators, in line with your M&E plan, and also generate learnings to help answer your learning questions. Please note that there are of course many other ways or methods that might be more relevant to your work.