Heather Britt

Development actors are embracing the concept and practice of adaptive management, using evidence to inform ongoing revisions throughout implementation.

Causal Link Monitoring (CLM) integrates design and monitoring to support adaptive management of projects.

"Outcome Harvesting is a utilisation-focused, highly participatory tool that enables evaluators, grant makers, and managers to identify, formulate, verify, and make sense of outcomes they have influenced when relationships of cause-effect a

"Outcome Harvesting is a utilisation-focused, highly participatory tool that enables evaluators, grant makers, and managers to identify, formulate, verify, and make sense of outcomes they have influenced when relationships of cause-effect a

This is a straightforward budget example that lists costs associated with four basic expenditure categories: staffing, materials and supplies, equipment and travel.  

Page 17 of this guide from Imagine Canada provides an example of an evaluation budget for a one-year project evaluation.

This document is a USAID guide to developing an evaluation budget based on the resources identified in the evaluation Statement Of Work (SOW). 

This strategy requires management leadership and uses the rule of thumb approach to estimate the percentage of project funds to spend on evaluation which could be done more accurately by developing an initial 

This strategy requires management leadership and uses the rule of thumb approach to estimate the percentage of project funds to spend on evaluation.

Evaluation expenses are highly situational and there are no magic formulas for calculating costs. 

This strategy for securing sufficient resources for conducting evaluation involves allocating a specified amount of staff time (hours or days per week) to work on evaluation.

An evaluation budget matrix specifies various items that need to be costed as individual line items. 

As many projects are undertaken by a consortium of organisations working together, sometimes it is worthwhile to consider approaching your implementing partners to pool resources and carry out the evaluation jointly. 

An approach designed to support ongoing learning and adaptation, which identifies the processes required to achieve desired results, and then observes whether those processes take place, and how.

Reducing costs is something to consider if evaluation costs outweigh the predicted benefits or available resources.

You may also consider approaching a foundation or other donor agency for the funds to undertake an evaluation.

The resources available for evaluation include people’s time and expertise, equipment and funding.