Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) activities are aimed at producing information that helps program and project participants improve their decision-making, efficiency, productivity and relevance. Evaluation should be a learning experience that involves all stakeholders in both the evaluation process and discussions about evaluation findings. M&E should not be an onerous additional activity demanded by donors, but rather should be a vital aspect of a research project that helps different stakeholders learn whether what they are doing can be improved or modified to meet their end objectives. The standard of evidence required will often be less rigorous than the standard applied in scientific research. Much of the value of evaluation comes from the process itself - involving all stakeholders in a discussion about where we are, what we want to achieve, and what we need to do to achieve it.

Some key questions that these resources highlight should be asked before and during any M&E activities are:

• Who will use this information?
• Why are we doing M&E?
• What kind of information is needed?
• How are we going to use this information?
• How can we collect this information in such a way that makes it a valuable learning process?
• Who will collect this information?
• When is the best time to collect this information?
  In thinking about M&E, it is critical to think about who will be using the information. How can the information be "packaged" in such a way that it is accessible to these users? What kind of information would be most useful for them? How might they be involved in the collection of this information? These are some helpful questions to pose as a project team develops an M&E strategy.

What are the ECAMAW's main M&E activities?
The ECAMAW uses several mechanisms to carry out monitoring and evaluation:

Reporting and Feedback
Annual work plans. We ask project teams to develop detailed annual workplans and we provide feedback on these plans. Our goal is to ensure that the overall project design will allow desired impacts to flow logically from the steps that are planned.

Annual technical and financial reports. These reports provide the most timely and regular source of M&E. The ECAMAW Coordinator provides feedback to project team members, and also extracts key findings as evidence of impacts for the overall program.

Reporting at meetings. There are always annual and other meetings. These reporting opportunities (oral and poster presentations) allow for feedback from peers as well as program representatives.

ECAMAW web. We make efforts to keep our web page timely and relevant. Project pages, topic pages and workshop pages all provide another mechanism for monitoring and evaluation of research results.