Recent Experience in the Monitoring and Evaluation of Nutrition-Related Projects in Developing Countries: Nine Lessons Learned

During the past fifteen years, there has been a significant increase in efforts to monitor and evaluate large scale nutrition projects. This, in turn, stems from an increased appreciation of the importance of M&E in such projects, and from more stringent demands being made by donors. This paper seeks to draw some lessons from this experience drawing on a large number of projects for which M&E documentation is available. These include the Tamil Nadu Integrated Nutrition Project in South India, the Bangladesh Integrated Nutrition Project, the Iringa Project in Tanzania, the Posyandu projects in Indonesia, the Integrated Child Development Service (ICDS) program in India, the UNICEF-assisted Dular project in Bihar state in India, the HKI Nutrition Focused Child Survival Project in Mali, the CARE-assisted Child Survival Project in Nicaragua, the Enhanced Outreach Strategy of the Ethiopian Child Survival Project, Save the Children (US) positive deviance-based projects in Vietnam and its Jibon o Jibika Project in Bangladesh, and the Progresa Project in Mexico.