How We Verify

This page sets out the standards every page on monival.org is written and reviewed against. It is the contract behind the content: if a page falls short of what is described here, that is a defect, and we want to hear about it.

Every substantive claim traces to a primary source

A substantive claim — a definition, a methodological rule, a standard’s requirement, a donor’s threshold — must be traceable to the document that actually establishes it. We do not cite a blog post summarising a standard when the standard itself is available. Where we state something from our own practice experience rather than a published source, we say so explicitly, so you can weigh it accordingly.

The source hierarchy

When sources disagree, or when we choose what to cite, we rank them:

1. Standard-setting bodies and peer-reviewed method literature. The organisations that issue evaluation standards, norms and official guidance, and the journal literature in which methods are established and tested. These are the anchor.
2. Secondary summaries. Textbooks, agency syntheses, method guides and practitioner handbooks. Useful for orientation, cited when they add clarity — but they do not override the primary material they summarise.
3. Vendor and consultancy material. Cited only for facts about the vendor’s own product or practice, never as authority for a methodological claim. This includes Sibasi’s own material and Monival’s documentation — they get no exemption from the rule.

What a citation looks like

Citations on this site name the issuing body, the title, the year, and give a resolvable link — to the document itself where it is openly published, or to the publisher’s canonical page where it is not. A citation you cannot follow is not verification; if a link on this site is dead, that is a defect worth reporting.

Contested questions stay contested

M&E has genuine, unresolved disagreements — about the place of experimental designs, about participatory methods, about how much measurement a small programme can bear. Where a question is contested, the page says so, presents the positions fairly, and cites both sides. We do not flatten a live debate into a false consensus, and we do not present our own working preference as settled ground.

What the dates mean

Every page carries an updated date. It means a person reviewed the page’s claims against their cited sources on that date — not merely that a typo was fixed. A page is only claimed to be current as of that date; standards revised afterwards are not reflected until the next review. Older updated dates deserve proportionally more of your scepticism.

Corrections {#corrections}

If you find an error — a wrong claim, a misread source, a dead link, a misattribution — email [email protected] with the page URL and what is wrong. We will check it against the sources and correct, re-attribute or withdraw promptly. Substantive corrections are noted on the affected page so the record is visible, not silently rewritten.