Following on from the Making General Surveillance Work project, ABARES is developing a Guide for Program Design, Monitoring and Evaluation of General Surveillance Programs. It will provide a step-by-step guide to support general surveillance program coordinators and teams to design general surveillance programs, including a monitoring and evaluation component.
Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) offers a systematic way of supporting learning about where to best target efforts and investment, apply adaptive management, and continually improve programs. In addition, M&E provides investors with evidence about what their investments achieved. More broadly, M&E builds an evidence base of what is working and what isn’t in general surveillance programs.
Monitoring involves the process of keeping track of the progress of a program against what it intends to achieve and supports adaptive management to ensure program activities are responsive to issues and opportunities as they arise.
Evaluation involves a systematic investigation of program effectiveness, efficiency and appropriateness to determine merit (value) or worth (usefulness) of a program involving judgements about, for example, to what extent the program activities are achieving the desired objective(s).
The Guide will equip general surveillance program staff to consult with key stakeholders to develop a theory of change that outlines how program activities will lead to the desired outcomes.
This becomes the foundation for the monitoring and evaluation components. The Guide will be based on systems thinking; the Measurement Evaluation Reporting and Improvement (MERI) approach used in LandCare programs; the practical experience from past and present general surveillance programs; and M&E literature related to active surveillance and citizen science. It will be a companion document to the General Surveillance Program Guidelines, and contain various references to the General Surveillance Guidelines for more information.
For more information, contact Heleen Kruger or Jen Ticehurst.