Evaluation is a management tool.
It is an essential component of intelligent management, a coordinated, coherent system of decisions designed to maximize the effectiveness of programmatic efforts, given a set of internal and external constraints. We face a number of challenges in making evaluation an integral, essential and useful component of program efforts. Evaluations require resources and in the context of resource scarcity it is sometimes perceived as a diversion from the main purpose of a project, service delivery to clientele. The ultimate outcomes of interventions in terms of their measurable impacts on clientele performance often manifest themselves after a considerable lag. This is particularly true when our interventions are targeted to clientele that are enmeshed in a constellation of economic, institutional and cultural constraints.