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There are four key terms for four key concepts: Monitoring, Evaluation, Impact Assessment and Performance Assessment. These are complementary but distinct concepts.
Evaluation This is the common generic term for all evaluation practices. It also has a specific meaning. It indicates the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability of a project/programme. It is normally carried out after project/programme completion, usually by people external to the project. However, many agencies have an evaluative exercise at the midpoint of a project/programme cycle to check that the outcomes of the intervention are broadly on target, or need to be changed in order to meet the original purpose. Although evaluative activities may appear towards the middle and end of the line chronologically, they need to be thought about as part of the project design because baselines, regular data collection and evaluative frameworks have to be built in at, or near, the start of the work. Ideally thinking about long-term impact should be a key part of the design and planning phase of the project/programme. Where monitoring may explain what is happening, evaluation attempts to explain why these things are happening and to learn and share important lessons. Evaluation is also a mechanism by which those managing the project/programme are held accountable to both beneficiaries and funders. Monitoring This is distinct from evaluation. It is used by managers to assess the progress of the project/programme. Monitoring is undertaken by those running the project/programme, so normally it is a mainly internal process. It is carried out at regular intervals throughout the life of the project/programme and is usually built into the internal performance management systems. Indicators and methods of checking progress against the indicators are usually built into the design process, but to be effective these need to be fully owned, and understood, by the project/programme staff and stakeholders. Impact Assessment This examines the effect of the project/programme interventions. There may be intended and unintended impacts. An impact assessment tries to differentiate those changes that are attributable to the project/programme interventions, from other external factors contributing to change. In other words, impact assessment tries to assess what has happened as a result of the project/programme, and what may have happened without it. Performance Assessment This incorporates a number of different meanings, depending on the organisational or inter-organisational context in which it is applied. In the parc we use the concept to cover all monitoring, evaluation and impact assessment activity which can contribute, in the world of international development, to improvements in performance against the internationally agreed international development targets. Our understanding of these terms and their inter-relationships is changing all the time, just as the context in which they are applied shifts and develops. We see the relationship of these terms here: 
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