This will provide a basis on which to design the project. Information is also needed as a baseline against which to monitor change and impact. They relate the work to the principles and values of different stakeholders, and to broader issues of local plans and national development strategies. Objectives themselves may need to be changed in response to change outside, or to changing understanding. The activities should be planned to help achieve specific objectives, which in turn contribute towards achieving the broader aims.
Monitoring needs to be integrated into programme management at the planning stage.
A monitoring system should give people the knowledge they need to make sensible decisions about what to do next. To create a system of monitoring that really works you need to ask who needs to know what, and why. For example, in a water project a villager needs to know which wells they have access to, how clean the water is and how much they have to pay. A donor funding the project may need to know how much it costs to provide a given population with a certain number of wells. Monitoring should be a communication system designed to improve management and policy decisions for different stakeholders.