The role of monitoring and evaluation on the performance of family planning programs in Kinondoni district, Tanzania.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of monitoring and evaluation on the performance of family planning programs in Kinondoni District. The study had three objectives, namely to: (i) assess the factors influencing the performance of monitoring and evaluation in family planning programs, (ii) examine the approaches used to implement monitoring and evaluation in family planning programs, and (iii) examine the utilization of monitoring and evaluation results on performance of family planning programs. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used in the study with a total of 67 respondents involving M&E officers, Program officers, M&E managers and Data coordinators who were sampled through simple random sampling and purposive sampling from eleven non-governmental organizations. Data were collected by using documentary review, structured interview and in-depth interview. The study findings showed that monitoring and evaluation improves the performance of family planning programs. The findings revealed that the motives for conducting M&E were both internal and external. Non-governmental organizations conduct evaluation during program design stage, during implementation stage and during the end line of the program. The findings further reveled that results based monitoring and evaluation was a preferred approach for tracking and assessing family planning programs. The study findings further indicate that NGOs, donors and stakeholders use monitoring and evaluation findings to inform policy and future programs. Some of the challenges hindering the performance of M&E in family planning include inadequacy of monitoring and evaluation system, lack of quality and quantity of monitoring and evaluation experts and insufficiency of financial resources. Based on these findings, the study recommends that non-governmental organizations should design and structure good monitoring and evaluation systems to assist in performance of M&E activities. NGOs should use 10-15 percentage of total budget for monitoring and evaluation. Moreover, the study recommends that NGOs should improve evaluation process by conducting impact evaluation in order to assess the long term impact of the programs. In addition, the study recommends further