Ethics in M&E

When to Use

Ethical considerations apply to every M&E activity involving human participants - which is almost all of them. They become critical when:

• Working with vulnerable populations: children, survivors of violence, people living with HIV, refugees, or displaced persons
• Collecting sensitive data: income, sexual behavior, violence exposure, political views
• Conducting evaluations where findings could affect funding, employment, or community standing
• Working in politically sensitive contexts where evaluation findings could be misused

Ethics in M&E is not a compliance checkbox. It is an ongoing commitment to respecting the people whose lives are being studied and whose voices inform the evidence.

How It Works

Core Ethical Principles

The American Evaluation Association (AEA) and the UNEG Ethical Guidelines for Evaluation define five core principles:

1. Respect for persons: treat participants as autonomous agents with the right to make informed decisions about participation
2. Beneficence: maximise benefits and minimise harms for participants, communities, and society
3. Justice: distribute the benefits and burdens of M&E fairly; ensure marginalised groups are not disproportionately studied without benefit
4. Transparency: be honest about purpose, methods, limitations, and findings
5. Competence: only conduct M&E for which you have the skills, knowledge, and resources to do responsibly

Informed Consent

Every participant in M&E data collection must be informed about the purpose of the research, how their data will be used, who will see it, what the risks are, and their right to refuse or withdraw. Consent must be voluntary - not coerced by program incentives or power relationships. For vulnerable populations (children, people with cognitive impairments), additional protocols apply.

Data Privacy and Confidentiality

Personal data collected in M&E must be stored securely, accessed only by those with a legitimate need, and de-identified before use in reports. Data collected for monitoring cannot be repurposed for other uses without renewed consent. Digital data must be encrypted; field devices must be password-protected.

Do No Harm

Evaluation activities must not expose participants to physical, social, economic, or psychological harm. This includes: not collecting sensitive data in communities where disclosure could create safety risks, not publishing identifiable case studies without consent, and mapping referral pathways for participants who disclose distressing experiences during interviews. (see do no harm)

Power and Positionality

Evaluators hold power over the people they study. M&E activities conducted by outsiders can marginalise local knowledge, impose external frameworks, and produce findings that benefit donors more than communities. Ethical practice requires evaluators to be explicit about their positionality and to design processes that give participants genuine voice.

Honest Reporting

Findings must be reported honestly, including negative results. Selective reporting - presenting only findings that reflect well on a program - is an ethical failure as well as a technical one. Evaluators who face pressure from clients to suppress negative findings should seek professional support through their association's ethics guidelines.

Key Components

• Informed consent protocol: documented process for obtaining and recording consent
• Data privacy plan: specifying how data is stored, who accesses it, and when it is deleted
• Do No Harm assessment: identifying potential harms and mitigation measures
• Ethical review process: formal review for evaluations involving vulnerable populations (IRB equivalent)
• Positionality statement: evaluator's acknowledgement of their position relative to participants
• Referral pathway documentation: for evaluations where participant distress is possible
• Honest reporting commitment: documented agreement on what will be reported and to whom

Best Practices

Build ethics into the design, not the protocol addendum. Ethical considerations should shape what questions are asked, how data is collected, and how findings are reported - not just consent forms added to a finished instrument.

Close the feedback loop. Share evaluation findings back with participating communities in an accessible format. The people whose lives were studied have a right to see what was concluded.

Maintain independence under pressure. Evaluators working for the same organization they are evaluating, or paid by the program being assessed, face structural conflicts of interest. Make independence arrangements explicit in the Terms of Reference.

Train enumerators on ethics, not just methods. Field staff conducting surveys and interviews are the frontline of ethical practice. Training must include what to do when participants disclose harm, how to handle sensitive data, and when to stop an interview.

Common Mistakes

Treating consent as a signature, not a process. Getting a signature on a consent form while rushing through the explanation satisfies legal requirements but not ethical ones. Consent is meaningful only when participants genuinely understand what they are consenting to.

Collecting sensitive data without a referral pathway. Asking questions about violence, trauma, or abuse without a pathway to support services exposes participants to harm. If you ask about GBV, you must have GBV referral options ready.

Publishing identifiable case studies without consent. "Success stories" featuring named beneficiaries, their photographs, and details of their personal circumstances require explicit, informed consent - not just a general data consent form.

Ignoring ethics in secondary data use. Using existing datasets collected for other purposes without ethical review is a common and underappreciated problem, particularly as administrative data becomes more available.