The Measurement Checklist

A question written inside the funder's building will produce answers the funder already suspected. Find the practitioner who is running into the problem and start the design there.

Write the sentence you hope to be able to say at the end of the study before you pick the method. If the method is the wrong shape for that sentence, change the method.

These are rarely the same thing. Much good MEL work consists of refusing the first proposed indicator and making the case for a better one.

The respondents pay it. Ask whether the information you want is worth the hour you are taking from a woman who has no hour to spare.

If everyone in your sample agreed to be sampled, the sample is polite. The farmer with the most grievances usually has the fewest ways to be heard. Build a frame that can find her, or admit that the frame does only half the job.

Most baselines confirm what the community already knew. Spend some of the baseline budget on listening to people properly before you measure anything.

Passing ethics review does not settle this, because the question is about ethics in practice. If the intervention is the difference between a meal and no meal, the control group is a group of people you have agreed to observe while they go hungry.

It will be read by a tired programme officer with seventeen other reports open on her desk. Write it for her from the first draft onwards.

Name it now, before the data arrives. If nothing would change your mind, the decision is already made and the study only dresses it up for the signature page.

If nobody will act on it, the report is expensive paper. Commission the action before the measurement begins.

Every measurement design has blind spots. Write yours down on the first page, then decide whether you are willing to sign off on them in public.