Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is a management tool that plays an important role in the design, direction, decision-making and accountability of IDE programs. The Rural Prosperity Initiative provides IDE with the opportunity to create an organization-wide M&E system that measures progress towards IDE’s goals of sustainable rural wealth creation; sustainable market systems; and positive gender, social and environmental impact. Wageningen University and Research Centre, Keller-Bliesner Engineering LLC, and GEO/Graphics provide significant expertise to IDE in the creation of this organization-wide M&E system. This system will enable IDE to:

• Gather and analyze data in order to track and shape progress towards goals and to analyze and attribute impacts;
• Aggregate and compare information and synthesize learning across projects, regions, and throughout the organization;
• Integrate GIS into the M&E toolkit to capture, manage, analyze, and display geographically-referenced information relevant to program initiatives;
• Create a coherent, holistic system that reduces the costs of measuring results while also establishing a standard level of rigor and accuracy.

Learning generated from M&E is used to continually improve IDE’s poverty reduction approach and to advocate for effective worldwide poverty reduction.