Do any of these monitoring and evaluation issues sound familiar? It feels like your monitoring and evaluation (M&E) has to demonstrate that your project is perfect. Your funder demands M&E data that's too cumbersome to collect. M&E feels more like an impediment than a resource to your work. Your M&E doesn't really touch on poverty alleviation, but only with project outputs. You have spent more time designing your monitoring system than you do using it. If you grapple with these questions, you're not alone. Development practitioners worldwide are trying to deal with similar problems - and they are finding ways of doing so. ""Rethinking M&E - Challenges and Prospects in the Changing Global Aid Environment"" incorporates the good examples and innovative M&E solutions of 120 development professionals from an enormous range of countries, circumstances and specialisms.""Rethinking M&E"" is based on Intraca's Sixth Evaluation Conference and regional M&E workshops in Ghana, India, Sweden and Peru, and includes perspectives from both NGOs and CSOs, donor ministries, activists, think-tanks and foundations.

Emphasising Southern perspectives and covering a rich variety of experiences, it stresses the important role of M&E in challenging many of our assumptions about poverty alleviation. ""Rethinking M&E"" both analyzes practitioner issues and situates them within wider aid trends. It takes as its premise the observation that official development aid is shifting towards an increasingly technocratic, managerial, state-centered approach.It follows that M&E within the aid chain worldwide is directed away from its focus on qualitative outcomes and long-term poverty alleviation impacts. Within this context, ""Rethinking M&E"" provides innovative insights into such areas as M&E of NGOs as donors, the M&E of advocacy and the M&E of humanitarian emergencies. Wherever you find yourself in the world of development M&E, this book will present useful experiences from others in similar situations. It shows that there is momentum and energy going into making M&E work for learning, empowerment and poverty eradication.

Esther Mebrahtu

Brian Pratt
Brian Pratt is one of the founding members of INTRAC and is the Executive Director. He has worked in many countries as a consultant and researcher for NGOs, and multi- and bilateral agencies. The primary focus of his publications and consultancies is on strategic policy issues for NGOs and Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E).

Linda Lonnqvist