Design, Monitoring and Evaluation (DME)

Design, Monitoring and Evaluation are tools, processes, systems and approaches that meet a multitude of purposes, needs and opportunities. Our goal is to facilitate reflective learning, in order to improve our effectiveness and accountability.

At Search, we currently have 16 DME Coordinators, who are based in our country offices and a DME Specialist in our Washington headquarters.

Our key DME objectives are - to foster a shared organisational ownership of our DME systems, tools and approaches; to build our organisational DME capacity; to facilitate cross-fertilisation on DME; and to create and continually refine our tools and systems:

• We strive to foster creativity in our DME systems and apply approaches that are suited to our social entrepreneurship. · Utilising coaching approaches and a DME Community of Practice (involving the 16 DME Coordinators) we are fostering capacity in DME through learning by doing and sharing.


• We are focusing our efforts on monitoring, as a capacity building tool. By tracking what we've done and how well we've done it, we can learn about the changes our work creates, we can demonstrate and add-up our results, and be informed and nimble when new opportunities arise:


• We undertake biannual programme evaluation and project evaluation.
  Click here to go to the evaluation page.



• We have Evaluation Guidelines for external evaluators.
  Click here to download a copy of the evaluations guidelines (pdf).

The Manual 'Designing for Results' (click here to download our evaluations manual.) provided a starting point for the process of developing our DME capacity. Additionally, we have over 20 years of knowledge and learning within the organisation to build upon. We aim to integrate DME into our programming by placing DME processes and tools within our project cycle. To this end we have a number of organisation wide DME projects underway:

• DME Glossary - SFCG definitions of key DME terms in non-technical language, in English and French. The DME Glossary will improve our communication and is a central component of our wider awareness and capacity raising efforts.



• DME Interactive Modules - which aim to provide non-technical practitioner-focused tools for using DME within conflict settings.



• Information Review - a long-term project to review our information systems with the aim of equipping our programmes to move quickly and increase their effectiveness. A key part of this project is to map, review and begin to harmonise indicators at Search.

Additionally, we are seeking opportunities to reach out to and learn from other organisations that are engaged in or are funding conflict transformation and peace building and to facilitate a dialogue about how results are identified and measured.. We welcome any comments on, or questions about, our DME systems, approach, and tools.

Evaluations
Please click here to see the country evaluations section.