Guidelines For Impact Monitoring In Economic And Employment Promotion Projects With Special Reference To Poverty Reduction Impacts Part I: Why Do Impact Monitoring? - A Guide

The paper states that advisors, planners and experts do not undertake impact monitoring because they think:

• The time and cost involved are too high;
• The impact of their projects can neither be observed nor measured.

The paper proceeds to discuss:

• Why impact monitoring is important?
• How it can help?
• The concepts on which impact oriented monitoring and evaluation systems are based.

It states that impact assessment can help determine:

• What are the changes that took place?
• Whether they were desirable or undesirable?
• How these changes come about?
• Why some desired changes did not set in?

The paper defines impact, monitoring and impact monitoring. It discusses different levels of monitoring, main impact areas and difficulties encountered in the process.

Finally the paper introduces six steps for monitoring impact:

• Agreeing on the goals of impact monitoring;
• Identifying impact areas;
• Formulating impact hypothesis;
• Developing indicators for measuring impact;
• Selecting methods of data collection and collecting the corresponding information;
• Evaluating information and feedback.