InterAction members justifiably pride themselves on their contributions to human and environmental protection and well-being. Through decades of service provision and advocacy, carried out directly and with partners, InterAction members have gained substantial insight and experience, allowing our community to undertake a wide array of development and humanitarian interventions.
What is M&E?
Nurturing, learning from, improving and eventually judging the effectiveness of our work requires processes and tools commonly understood as monitoring and evaluation (M&E). When integrated deliberately into our work and conducted with appropriate rigor, M&E supports learning and quality improvement at an intervention, program or sector level, for a population or area, as well as for an organization itself. One component of M&E gaining increased attention among international NGOs is impact evaluation, which is often used when piloting new programs or testing an approach with potentially large-scale implications and tells us whether our interventions ultimately contributed to a desired outcome.
The international NGO community and our partners—including local civil society organizations, host country governments, donors and those we seek to serve—widely acknowledge M&E’s importance. Tracking and assessing our work allows us to make crucial improvements to our performance and offers invaluable assurance to our partners that their collaboration with us produces positive change. Furthermore, due to a broad demand for more rigorous evidence that interventions produce intended impacts, NGOs have begun to more systematically integrate impact evaluations into our programming.
Evaluation and Program Effectiveness Working Group
InterAction's mandate is to support member organizations’ capability to conduct programming that meets and exceeds internal self-certification standards for quality and effectiveness. InterAction, members and partners are working together to strengthen our M&E capacities through experience and resource sharing, as well as opportunities to work with outside experts.
The Evaluation and Program Effectiveness Working Group (EPEWG) helps build NGO monitoring and evaluation capacity. Currently, the EPEWG is focusing its efforts on impact evaluation and advocacy evaluation capacity building.
If you are an InterAction member you are welcome to sign up for the EPEWG by registering for an account and requesting membership for the EPEWG. The EPEWG is open to non-members that are involved or interested in M&E, by permission only.
