The changing face of monitoring and evaluation in the age of COVID-19: practitioners’ field experiences from Zimbabwe

The emergence of COVID-19 as a global pandemic presented a novel challenge to monitoring and evaluation in the humanitarian and development sectors. The measures taken to contain the spread of COVID-19 disrupted the traditional way of doing business in both the programming and monitoring and evaluation sectors. In particular, restrictions on movement in order to reduce the spread of the virus meant that monitoring and evaluation work had to transform from the traditional approaches. This study sought to investigate how monitoring and evaluation practice has evolved under the COVID-19 pandemic in Zimbabwe. The main objective of the study was to document lessons learned from different organisations and practitioners and to share best practice. The study deployed an online survey using Kobotoolbox and reached 171 respondents. A Webinar session with six presentations and discussions with programming, monitoring and evaluation practitioners in Zimbabwe was held to share experiences and lessons learned. This was followed up by key informant interviews with selected stakeholders. The study revealed a general shift from conventional monitoring and evaluation to COVID-19 tailored approaches which include deprioritisation of face to face data collection and increased remote data collection mechanisms, maximum utilisation of secondary data, limiting data collection to essential and critical data, simplifying the data collection methods and, rethinking sampling designs to promote inclusion. The study makes several recommendations for best practice and learning.