Monitoring systems and government M&E

At some point a monitoring function stops being a set of spreadsheets and becomes a system — with data flows, interoperability questions, an aggregation hierarchy, and someone accountable for it running. This section covers that transition and the public-sector machinery built on top of it.

Government M&E deserves its own treatment because its incentives differ. A national system is not primarily trying to learn whether an intervention worked; it is trying to hold institutions to commitments, allocate budget and report to a legislature. Designs that make sense for a donor-funded project can fail completely inside that logic, and the reverse is equally true.