M&E in an intercultural education setting involves the collection and analysis of data to measure if progress is being made towards certain pre-determined objectives.
Though M&E often seems abstract or unimportant, it can, in fact, provide important benefits to individuals and organisations. On a personal level, it allows physical education teachers and coaches to better understand and improve their intercultural sport sessions. For organisations, it allows them to better identify good practice and allocate resources accordingly. And it allows these organisations to prove the effectiveness of their work and present concrete results to sometimes sceptical external parties who may sometimes need to be convinced to adopt new concepts such as intercultural education through sport.
Monitoring and evaluation are often used in combination, but each term comes with its own specific meaning. Monitoring is the systematic and routine collection of information from whereas evaluation is the systematic assessment of that information. Evaluation should help draw conclusions about the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability of an action.
To implement proper M&E, four important steps need to be undertaken:
