General Technical Documents M&E Fundamentals - A Self-Guided Mini-Course

Nina Frankel, Anastasia Gage, Measure Evaluation, Updated 2016

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is an essential component of any intervention, project, or program. This mini-course covers the basics of program monitoring and evaluation in the context of population, health and nutrition programs. It also defines common terms and discusses why M&E is essential for program management.

At the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Identify the basic purposes and scope of M&E
• Differentiate between monitoring functions and evaluation functions
• Describe the functions of an M&E plan
• Identify the main components of an M&E plan
• Identify and differentiate between conceptual frameworks, results frameworks, and logic models
• Describe how frameworks are used for M&E planning
• Identify criteria for the selection of indicators
• Describe how indicators are linked to frameworks
• Identify types of data sources
• Describe how information can be used for decision-making

This course is based on the M&E fundamentals web course created by MEASURE Evaluation for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Global Health Learning website: It follows an interactive version found online on USAID’s Global Health eLearning Center at http://www.globalhealthlearning.org/course/m-e-fundamentals.