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Graduation Approach for Refguees: M&E Guide and Toolkit
ABSTRACT
A well-designed and executed project monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system is invaluable. The development sector increasingly acknowledges M&E as central to an organization’s ability to
deliver the right intervention to the right people, to ensure transparency and accountability, and to enable practitioners to clearly understand what they are doing, to learn from projects as they unfold, and to share information and evidence with others in the sector. However, creating and implementing a high quality but streamlined M&E system is not a simple process. Common constraints include lack of commitment to M&E by donors or implementing organizations, poor understanding about the functions and benefits of M&E, a weak culture of using M&E results to manage adaptively, a shortage of M&E specialists or trained staff, a limited M&E budget, and a lack of clear guidance around M&E. Currently, little guidance around M&E considerations for Graduation Approach (GA) projects exists,
and even less for GA projects designed to serve refugees and host communities. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and implementing partner (IP) staff often have vastly varying levels of familiarity and understanding of M&E concepts and functions in general, and M&E of GA in particular. (See Text Box 1) Trickle Up developed the Graduation Approach for Refugees M&E Guide and Toolkit (“the Guide”) for livelihoods practitioners, including UNHCR and IP staff, who implement or are interested in implementing GA programming in refugee contexts (GA4R). The Guide aims to capture and leverage good practices and lessons learned from the UNHCR Zimbabwe Scaling Graduation with Refugees pilot, from UNHCR GA pilots in other countries, and from Trickle Up GA projects for non-refugees. It aims to benefit those who face the same questions and challenges as those faced during the UNHCR Zimbabwe pilot by providing foundational information upon which to build an adequate and useful M&E system. The Guide also provides examples of methods, tools, templates and additional resources from other GA projects, many of which are available in the Guide’s accompanying Zip Folder.CITATION
Bernagros et al. 2019. Graduation Approach for Refguees: M&E Guide and Toolkit. New York: Trickle Up.