Leveraging Realtime M&E for Adaptive Youth Employment Programming

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is a crucial component of programme management, used to satisfy a range of information needs for donors, implementers, and the wider development community alike. These information needs typically fall within one of two categories: information used to "prove" an intervention's activities, impact, or model or information used to "improve" programming, through the supply of relevant data to inform decision-making during the programme lifecycle. While these two ideally should complement each other, donors' and others' demands for independent and objective proof have increasingly caused M&E systems to be structured around this objective, missing opportunities to gather and use data to improve programme impact during implementation. This paper explores three areas in which tweaks to M&E system structures could enhance scope for "improvement": in tracking service delivery, in identifying and understanding outcomes, and in the scope of participation from the implementing team. The paper then presents the M&E system employed by Prospects' Employment and Entrepreneurship Programme, which is geared heavily toward "improvement" and adaptive management and shares some learnings about challenges and successes. (p. 1)