Monitoring and evaluation strategies and tools are essential components of development practice.  Since the goal of any development project is to improve the lives and future prospects of individuals, families, communities and nations, it is important to know in detail whether and how a given intervention is having the desired impacts.  This is especially the case given the vast resources—financial, institutional and human—invested in these projects, and the resulting opportunity costs if these investments prove ineffective.

As enthusiasm has grown for ICT4D projects in the past decade, it has become more urgent to develop effective strategies and tools for monitoring these projects and evaluating their effectiveness and impact.  Yet doing so is especially difficult in the case of ICT projects, because their impact is often diffuse, long-term, and highly dependent on a variety of enabling factors, many of them unrelated to ICT.  Nonetheless, given the resources devoted to these projects, and the understandable skepticism among many in developing countries and development agencies about the value of ICT4D projects, it is vitally important to work to develop rigorous and replicable monitoring and evaluation tools.

infoDev is devoting increasing energy and resources to sponsoring the development of monitoring and evaluation strategies and tools both for its own programs and for broader use by the international development community.