M&E needs to be designed at the start of any VAWG programme. When setting programme objectives, consider the scope of all activities that need to be undertaken to track, measure and evaluate progress and its success in achieving the goal. M&E activities will vary based on the type of VAWG approach, for example, the M&E required for a school-based GBV prevention programme would look different to assessing the implementation of a domestic violence policy or legislation. VAWG programmes require robust M&E systems to be in place to assess and understand complex issues such as social norms change and different pathways to change. Without good M&E planning, it is difficult to demonstrate impact and identify what resources, budget and timeframes are required.

M&E systems and frameworks should follow a set of Guiding Principles to ensure programmes are relevant, useful, timely, credible, and sustainable. These principles may include:

• Involving and engaging local partners and stakeholders – in the design of M&E frameworks to appropriately account for the needs and priorities of all actors and stakeholders throughout the process. This participation can take a number of forms, including consultation (seeking input and feedback on programme design and implementation), collaboration (co-designing and co-implementing programmes), partnership (engaging stakeholders as partners in the planning, implementation, and evaluation phases) and empowerment (ensuring stakeholders have the information, resources, and skills to effectively participate in the M&E process).
• Taking a survivor-centred approach – to protect the privacy, confidentiality, and physical and emotional safety of the women involved by ensuring their dignity and respecting their wishes so that survivors are not at risk of further harm throughout the M&E process. Participation in M&E activities is usually voluntary in nature, with gained informed consent, and any data is collected by trained GBV programme staff together with survivors.
• Adopting a gender-responsive and an intersectional approach – by integrating an analysis of gender and power relations, and using participatory and inclusive methods to engage with key stakeholders to ensure that no one is left behind. This includes women and girls, GBV survivors or those at high risk of violence, persons of diverse sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics, persons with disabilities, persons who hold multiple identities and/or other marginalised and vulnerable groups including child survivors of sexual abuse and adolescent boys and adult men survivors of sexual violence.
• Focusing on both learning and accountability – by collecting data that is useful for programme design, adaptation, decision-making, assessing progress and lesson-learning, and ensuring that there are feedback mechanisms to share results with the participants and communities involved. This includes understanding what interventions and strategies are effective at preventing and responding to violence against women and girls, what services are needed, the role of different sectors in addressing and preventing violence, and the cost/investments required to produce more promising results.
• Encouraging active participation – by using methods and tools that are adapted and are appropriate to the local context, including attention to the socio-cultural, economic and political context, language and literacy levels, and any disabilities of participants.
• Collective learning – by emphasizing a shift from traditional, extractive M&E methods, a more collaborative approach fosters mutual benefits and ensures that beneficiaries and local practitioners not only contribute to monitoring, but also retain ownership of the knowledge they help create, enhancing the overall effectiveness and sustainability.

An M&E framework is a key guidance tool underpinning an M&E system. There are 7 main steps to take when developing an M&E framework for a VAWG programme:

• Conduct formative research/situational analysis to identify issues/challenges and establish the problem statement of the Theory of Change. It can also be useful to map the stakeholders and other programmes and projects.
• Develop a Theory of Change (ToC) to outline how and why the desired change is expected to happen in a VAWG programme. A ToC begins with a clear problem statement, identifying the specific issue the programme aims to address. Following this, the ToC outlines a set of proposed activities or inputs designed to address the problem, leading to specific outputs (the direct results of programme activities), outcomes (the short- to medium-term changes resulting from the outputs), and ultimately the intended impact (the long-term change the programme seeks to achieve). Central to this process is the articulation of underlying assumptions or hypotheses, which clarify the necessary conditions for success or understanding failure. A visual representation of the ToC can help understand the different components and pathways of change. See Spotlight Initiative’s ToC in the case study section.
• Develop a results framework and/or logframe to map out the expected inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes and impacts of a VAWG programme. However, it is also important that monitoring processes are able to capture unintended effects by using a flexible and responsive approach that incorporates qualitative methods, participatory monitoring, regular feedback mechanisms and an adaptive management strategy.
• Design M&E and learning questions to ask questions that centre the voices of women and girls; exploring what changes are and are not happening, how and why, including unintended consequences. This is informed by the programme’s ToC, and can be added into the results framework and regularly reported on.
• Select an evaluation approach that is aligned with the programme scope, desired results and timing. For more information on how to understand these different evaluation approaches, as well as the challenge of attributing outcomes, please see ‘How to select an evaluation strategy’.
• Develop indicators to measure progress or impact of a programme or project (i.e. output, outcome, or impact indicators). Good indicators are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound (SMART). These indicators reflect the changes expected to be seen as a result of the programme, which could emerge from the ToC.  For more information, see ‘How to design indicators to measure change.’ Indicators should be aligned with comparable global indicators and international standards to measure VAWG. At the same time, it is important to develop additional localised indicators to capture the specificities of each context.
• Establish M&E and learning tools for data collection to effectively measure indicators on GBV prevention, risk mitigation and response and related attitudes, behaviors and social norms. These can include pre- and post-test questionnaires, monitoring checklists, participant feedback forms, focus group discussions, key informant interviews, field monitoring visits, monitoring reports, training facilitator surveys etc. Tools should be accessible or made accessible to different populations, considering factors such as literacy, language, disability, and access to digital tools. Ensuring the security of data is essential.

An evaluation approach should be identified early in the programme design phase. This ensures that targets are realistic, partnerships are established, and sufficient budget, time and resources are allocated to match the evaluation’s scope and complexity. It often requires a tailored mix of methodologies, ranging from experimental (e.g. randomized controlled trials), quasi-experimental (e.g. difference in differences), to non-experimental (e.g. pre- and post- studies) approaches, alongside methods like participatory evaluation, most significant change and outcome harvesting. It is also important to ensure that evaluation findings, recommendations and lessons generate useful evidence to answer key questions on the programme’s performance and to inform the design of future programmes. It can also help understand how to improve programme activities, determine which ones to continue or discontinue, and plan for scale up.

A monitoring plan guides how the intervention will be tracked and examined or assessed overall. It also defines project objectives and assumptions, indicators, data collection methods and activities, and plans for disseminating results including strategies, procedures, resources, partnerships, roles and responsibilities, and schedules.

At the early design stage, an M&E focal point and evaluation team (ideally with experience in VAWG programming) should be appointed and engaged to help with initial thinking on the M&E approach and methodologies. This ensures robust monitoring processes are set up and tested prior to implementation, with adequate time to incorporate feedback and adapt the programme, as well as identify opportunities to work with local partners and coordinate on evaluation priorities. It is important to invest in quality M&E functions and activities by assessing capacity and allocating sufficient resources to collect, manage, process and analyse data. These costs should be detailed in the programme budget.

Monitoring plans should be created during the early stages of programme development. Each monitoring plan for a VAWG project or programme contains the following key components:

• Key indicators – using quantitative or qualitative variables at each level (outputs, outcomes, and goal), and available resources, to accurately measure the programme’s success.
• Means of Verification – the sources of data/tools used and processes followed (e.g. frequency) to collect data to measure progress against each indicator.
• Assumptions and Risks – external contingencies that may positively or negatively affect programme outcomes.
• Roles and responsibilities – highlighting which stakeholder is responsible for collecting the data and describing how they will manage the data.
• Reporting requirements – including reporting tools and mechanisms used to incorporate results into prevention and response planning.

Both routine data and monitoring data collection activities in VAWG programmes are critical opportunities for women and girls to engage in the planning, implementation and analysis stages and to make space for affected populations to have their voices heard. Thus, collecting and/or analysing any information from women and girls about their experiences of violence must be done in a safe and ethical manner to ensure their physical, psychological, and social wellbeing is not put at risk in the process. This ensures that programme development and implementation, advocacy and resource mobilization are based on the needs and solutions identified by the affected population.

When planning M&E, it can be useful to think about how M&E can support decisions about whether to adapt or scale up a VAWG programme. For adaptation, the pilot stage is a key time to establish robust M&E systems that can help track results and fidelity (whether the intervention has maintained fidelity to the core components of the original programme), identify unintended consequences, and if necessary, implement risk mitigation measures or pivot programming. Additionally, process/implementation evaluations can also help programmes to learn about what is working and not working, and identify how it could be improved.

For scale-up, monitoring data is also critical to tracking fidelity and intensity of activities, ensuring there is sufficient technical support, time and human and financial resources, to expand coverage. As efforts to scale a programme are likely to come up against new and unexpected opportunities and constraints, learnings must be documented, including challenges and efforts to overcome them and use this learning to adapt interventions so they are better suited to the new context. An RCT or other type of rigorous evaluations may not be appropriate to demonstrate evidence of the effectiveness of programming at scale. Thus, other methodologies may need to be considered to understand pathways to and mechanisms of change which are also better suited to local capacity and resources.

VAWG programmes aim to shift gender and power inequalities and therefore can lead to negative responses and backlash from community members, men and power holders – such as resistance, controlling behaviours and/or further violence. Most practitioners can identify some form of resistance in their day-to-day experiences of working in this space: institutional inertia, denial of support for feminist work, pushback on “progressive” feminist agendas, attacks on civil society spaces, or even the re-emergence of resistance because of shifting political agendas. Therefore, all programmes should establish a project risk matrix and a standardised M&E system, with tools such as participant feedback surveys, satisfaction surveys and progress reports, to: identify, track and regularly manage risks, consider how these risks might interact with the programme, monitor and address any unintended consequences (including whether the programme is exacerbating violence against women and their children) and course correct as well as ensure mitigation strategies are put in place as part of adopting a Do No Harm approach.