Guide to the Monitoring and Evaluation of the National Response for Children Orphaned and Made Vulnerable by HIV/AIDS
The AIDS epidemic continues to result in increasing numbers of children being orphaned and made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS. One of the major challenges facing governments, international organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in their response is the lack of data on the quality and effectiveness of their interventions.
This document provides guidance to governments, international organizations and NGOs in the monitoring and evaluation of the national response for children orphaned and made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS. It includes methods and tools for measurement at the national level. The indicators in this guide supplement the UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS (UNGASS/AIDS) and MDG orphan school attendance indicator with a set of recommended standardized core indicators that each country could monitor to assess the effectiveness of its national response and thereby inform programming.
While monitoring should be an integrated activity conducted from the global to the local level, this guide does not cover the much more detailed monitoring and evaluation needs of individual projects for children orphaned and made vulnerable by HIV/AIDS. Some of the indicators may remain relevant at the level of monitoring and evaluating a specific intervention by one community-based organization, but they will certainly not cover the full range of project monitoring and evaluation needs. Also, at project/community level the indicators will probably need to be adjusted to the situation of the beneficiaries and the response for specific communities for which an intervention is programmed. Neither does this manual attempt to cover in detail the more general aspects of monitoring and evaluation.
This guide has been developed under the direction of the UNAIDS Monitoring and Evaluation Reference Group. It complements other indicator guidelines on monitoring and evaluation related to HIV/AIDS (HIV prevention among young people, prevention of infections among infants and young children, care and support for people living with HIV/AIDS, etc.) coordinated by the MERG.
