Malnutrition rates continue to climb throughout the world, and food/nutritional security interventions, particularly those targeting children, are increasingly turning to foreign food aid donations, economic development interventions, and agricultural subsidy programs to address the problem of malnutrition. Donors and implementers alike are asking whether the solutions to these problems lie in interventions involving fortification (adding nutrients to food), nutritional supplementation (provision of vitamins), commercialization (growing food on large scale to be sold in the market), and provision of food aid and therapeutic food (free or subsidized provision of food); or in promoting the use of local resources and traditional knowledge in local gardening or subsistence farming.
This expert post comes from Gary Woller, President of Woller & Associates and a M&E consultant to the STRIVE Program.
This is the question I was asked about a year ago when I began an assignment as a monitoring and evaluation consultant to the STRIVE Program. Since then, I have worked closely with this multi-organizational initiative to develop results indicators for economic strengthening projects and to develop M&E ‘systems’ to accurately track, capture, analyze and use the results indicators to improve interventions. Our goal has been to design M&E systems that are as rigorous as possible, while remaining practical for individual projects to implement. Achieving this has proven to be no small feat and, frankly, we still have a ways to go.
