USAID’s Complexity-Aware M&E Team is championing five approaches to complexity-aware monitoring, which the Team is supporting through trials. The resources to your right are authored by industry leaders serving on the Complexity-Aware Monitoring Resource Panel as well as other experts.  

The five recommended approaches are:

  1. Sentinel Indicators: Proxy for the system that signals the need for further investigation (like a “canary in a coal mine”)

  2. Stakeholder Feedback: A process that seeks perspectives of partners, beneficiaries, or those excluded from a project

  3. Process Monitoring of Impacts: Tracks predicted and emergent processes that transform outputs to results

  4. Most Significant Change: Captures results across diverse stakeholders groups and makes each of their perspectives on those results explicit

  5. Outcome Harvesting: Works backwards to describe and verify contribution, and captures unexpected results

When applied in tandem with the principles, these approaches will get you started in the world of complexity-aware monitoring.

Keep checking our resources to the right for more information on each approach!