![]() ![]() But that’s a mere throat-clearing for a 90-minute progression through life’s various stages that touches on birth, death and the afterlife, and all the grim little pitstops we take along the way. The Terry Gilliam “short feature” that prefaces the film, The Crimson Permanent Assurance, feels conspicuously disconnected from it, but it’s also a fascinating dry run for Gilliam’s Brazil two years later, staging a bureaucratic revolt by elderly accountants as if it were an old-fashioned swashbuckler. But no film has worked harder or succeeded more than The Meaning of Life to hold the chapters to a high comedy standard and bring them together under a smart, prismatic conceit that really does seek to comment on the big questions in a meaningful way – even if the basic message is to look to the stars, because “there’s bugger all on Earth”.įorty years later, The Meaning of Life feels timeless by design, because its sketches are not tied to inside jokes or up-to-the-minute cultural references, but more longstanding existential miseries. The sketch comedy movie is a notoriously difficult nut to crack, for the same reasons that haunt other anthologies: some bits are inevitably better than others, and the sum of those bits doesn’t usually add up to a cohesive whole. These include, for example: performance monitoring indicators the logical framework theory-based evaluation formal surveys such as service delivery surveys, citizen report cards, living standards measurement surveys (LSMS) and core welfare indicators questionnaires (CWIQ) rapid appraisal methods such as key informant interviews, focus group discussions and facilitated brainstorming by staff and officials participatory methods such as participatory M&E public expenditure tracking surveys rigorous impact evaluation and cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis.In what would be their last feature together as a six-person troupe, following Holy Grail and Life of Brian, Monty Python returned to the sketch comedy roots of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which itself was anthologized in the 1971 film And Now for Something Completely Different. M&E can be conducted using a wide array of tools, methods and approaches. One approach is to rely on monitoring information to identify potential problem issues requiring more detailed investigation via an evaluation. But evaluation is a more detailed and time-consuming activity, and because of its greater cost it needs to be conducted more sparingly. In contrast, evaluation has the potential to provide a more balanced interpretation of performance. While monitoring information can be collected and used for ongoing management purposes, reliance on such information on its own can introduce distortions because it typically covers only certain dimensions of a project's or program's activities, and careful use of this information is needed to avoid unintended behavioral incentives. ![]() Monitoring information is a necessary but not sufficient input to the conduct of rigorous evaluations. Monitoring and evaluation are synergistic. ![]() An evaluation should (enable) the incorporation of lessons learned into the decision-making process of both partner and donor". to determine the relevance of objectives, the efficacy of design and implementation, the efficiency or resource use, and the sustainability of results. This includes the monitoring of a country's progress against the millennium development goals (MDGs), or other national measures of development success.Įvaluation can be defined as "the process of determining the worth or significance of a development activity, policy or program. Thus monitoring embodies the regular tracking of inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes and impacts of development activities at the project, program, sector and national levels. See Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Glossary of Key Terms in Evaluation and Results Based Management (Terms are presented in English, Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish). Monitoring can be defined as: "A continuing function that uses systematic collection of data on specified indicators to provide management and the main stakeholders of an ongoing development intervention with indications of the extent of progress and achievement of objectives and progress in the use of allocated funds". ![]()
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