Having external assessors take stock in an objective fashion at a given point in time is a valuable undertaking, especially for Fairtrade, which enjoyed considerable growth in Europe in the last fifteen years. It is also important, however, to assess impacts as part of an internal ongoing process. This is so that the organisation itself can learn, on a continuous basis, about its own progress towards its stated objectives. To this end, some Fairtrade organisations began work on developing monitoring systems (as distinct from one-off impact assessments) in order to understand and track the impact on their stakeholders. Monitoring and evaluation (M&E), therefore, are two distinct, but related, exercises: Monitoring is the systematic and continuous collecting and analysing of information about the progress of a piece of work over time. Evaluation is an assessment conducted at one point in time that concentrates on whether objectives of a piece of work have been achieved and what impact has been made (Gosling et al, pp.12-13). The evaluation can be conducted based on the information collected from monitoring.

Attachment	Size
MonitoringImpactofFairTradeInitiatives.pdf	399.42 KB