The Catholic Relief Services Asia M&E Guidance Series

*Revised January 2012

This series provides guidance for designing and implementing a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system. This series supports and complements CRS’ global M&E standards. While the global standards represent the agency’s commitment to quality M&E as a key component of program quality, this series provides ‘how to’ guidance for operationalizing this commitment in practice. Each topic in the series includes its own set of standards (page 3), which emphasize the specific key messages and quality considerations relative to the topic. While the global M&E standards are high level overarching commitments, the standards in this series provide practical quality control considerations specific to individual components of an M&E system.

This guidance series is intended for programming staff at all levels including M&E staff, field staff, and project managers/officers, and highlights the role of each in multiple steps. The content of this series complements the information provided in both ProPack I (Stetson et al. 2004) and ProPack II (Stetson et al. 2007) and references key sections of both documents. Staff should have a solid foundation in ProPack I and II in order to maximize the utility of this guidance.

Staff members in the initial phases of M&E system design should first read the basic M&E guidance topics and then proceed to consult the guidance for planning and implementing an M&E system, following each in chronological order. Staff members which have begun designing or implementing their M&E system should identify the topics which are currently most relevant to their project. However, it would be worthwhile for these staff to review the full series to see if there are revisions or changes which can be made to their current system to improve M&E quality.