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Purpose: Evaluation of Community-based Rehabilitation (CBR) is important for developing good practice and providing a foundation for evidence of efficacy of practice. Since not much is known about the extent to which monitoring and evaluation (M&E) are carried out within CBR programmes, this study aimed to enhance knowledge by focussing on current M&E activities, the need and capacity of programmes to conduct evaluations and the challenges experienced. 

Method: An online survey of 15 questions was developed, field-tested and sent out to 236 CBR managers in Africa, Asia and Latin America.  

Results: The majority (86%) of the respondents indicated that their programmes had been evaluated in the past.While this was mainly done by international donors (87%), only around half of the respondents reported programme participants as the main audience. Just over half of the programmes (54%) included people with disabilities, their families and community members in evaluation processes. Insufficient financial resources were considered the most important challenge to conduct evaluation, particularly in the African region and among smaller programmes. The complexity of CBR was also indicated as an important barrier to evaluation.

Conclusions and Recommendations:  Although evaluations have been widely implemented in CBR programmes, many of them are not locally owned, and people with disabilities and their families are often not included in evaluation processes. The issues of limited financial resources and CBR complexity reflect current discussions in other areas of mainstream development. It is therefore recommended that models for evaluation in CBR should learn from, and be embedded in, ongoing developments in mainstream evaluation in international developm

Purpose: This paper describes a three-year research project leading to the development of the CBR Monitoring Manual and Menu (MM&M). The MM&M is a practical toolkit that meets the needs of CBR managers and stakeholders, and is consistent with the philosophy of CBR and community- based disability-inclusive development. It is designed to produce meaningful and locally useful information and data, based on international data standards where possible, to enable aggregation at regional, national and international levels.

Methods: Five complementary workstreams of research were carried out from 2011 to 2014: 1) literature review and analysis; 2) participatory action research with CBR stakeholders; 3) analysis and refinement of validity of concepts andstructures; 4) consultation and review; and 5) synthesis of results. This article documents the method and key results of each of the five workstreams, and the lessons learned along the way.

Results: The MM&M is now freely available on-line at thttp://sydney.edu. au/health-sciences/cdrp/projects/cbr-monitoring.shtml. Collaboration among members of the development team continues, chiefly via an on-line group to which new members have been welcomed.

Conclusion and Implications: At the time of writing, the MM&M is the only international monitoring product, known to the authors, that consciously sets out to reflect both a ‘bottom- up’ and ‘top-down’ perspective of monitoring information and data.To achieve this for a complex programme such as CBR, and to align with its principles, it was essential to use a multi-component and multi-stage strategy for tool development, involving a diverse multidisciplinary team including collaboration with CBR stakeholders.