Home » In depth » Quality and learning » Programme quality improvement » Sightsavers adaptive monitoring and evaluation system

The Sightsavers Adaptive Monitoring and Evaluation system (SAME) is the result of an in depth analysis of Sightsavers' monitoring and evaluation practices. The system is based on developing key performance-focused questions at country level and linking them with organisational strategic performance indicators.

For management purposes its design is broken down into six core components:

• Why:  Why is M&E useful?
• What:  What specific strategic questions do we want to ask? What data should we collect to answer these questions? What indicators summarise this data?
• How:  How are we going to collect data for these indicators? Who is going to do it? How frequently, and what tools will they use?
• Learn:  What is the data telling us as far as our performance is concerned? Who needs to review the data? Have we made time to reflect on what it tells us?
• Improve:  Have we considered what went wrong as well as what went right? How can we apply our learning to our programming? What actions do we need to take?
• Who:  Who has overall oversight of all these processes? What resources should be in place to support their work?

SAME objective

The objective of SAME is to provide a robust, yet context specific, approach which allows us to not only to collect useful information, but also to analyse and reflect on this data, and to utilise the key learning to bring greater effectiveness to our work.

The system is designed support three key processes in Sighstavers, namely;

• building robust evidence for monitoring the implementation of our strategic framework (see our organisational monitoring page).
• enabling local decision making, and application of learning, by our country programmes.
• enhancing our accountability to beneficiaries, supporters and staff.

Evaluation reports

A prominent feature of SAME is the promotion of transparency and independence within the evaluation function. Please visit our evaluations page to find out more about our approach and read the latest reports.