GABORONE, Botswana — When Gertrude Matsika graduated from college with a bachelor’s in economics in 1997, she believed she would join the banking sector — but it was not to be.
More than 20 years down the line, she credits her passion for helping people and divine intervention for leading her through a series of alternative career choices that ended in the development sector as an expert in monitoring and evaluation, or M&E.
The field, also sometimes known as monitoring, evaluation, and learning, helps to provide development organizations with insight into whether a project is having the desired impact, whether it is cost-effective, and how it could be improved.