Tracking Progress & Achievement

This section of the toolkit offers tools for tracking progress (monitoring) and assessing achievement (evaluation).

Monitoring will help ensure that projects stay on course and on budget.

Effective evaluations of crime reduction initiatives seek to answer the following questions:

• Has change occurred?

• If so, is the project or programme responsible for the changes, or would they have happened anyway?

• If the initiative has several components, have all the components contributed to the changes or have some been effective while others have not had any impact?

• Is the initiative (or elements of it) worth replicating?

In practice this means:

• Comparing changes in the project area with trends in the wider area and in a control area with similar characteristics

• Documenting individual components in a programme separately to identify which elements have had an impact.

• Calculating costs and savings arising from the project to assess value for money.

• Looking at specific local circumstances which may have influenced the outcome of the project and affect the ease with which the project can be replicated.

Key general principles for evaluators

Sample monitoring and evaluation framework

Assessing costs and benefits [to be added]