Illustrative: an outcome 'Smallholder incomes improved' carries an output indicator 'Farmer groups formally registered', target 40, tracked quarterly — the same indicator object a workplan, a dashboard and a report all read.
MEL & Results
Results frameworks and indicators in one system
The Results Framework and its indicators are usually built in a spreadsheet and a reporting tool that drift apart. Keeping them as one object is what removes that drift.
Step 1 · Learn
Understand the concept
A common practical failure mode in programme measurement is not a bad Results Framework or bad indicators individually — it is that the Results Framework lives in one document (often a spreadsheet or a donor-required PDF) while the indicators actually get tracked somewhere else, and the two are reconciled by hand, occasionally, under deadline pressure. Every reconciliation is an opportunity for the tracked numbers to no longer match what was originally approved.
Keeping the hierarchy and its indicators as a single, live structure — rather than a document plus a separate tracking sheet — means a change to an indicator's target or unit is visible everywhere that indicator is used, instantly, rather than requiring someone to remember every place a stale copy might exist.
How METRA GET supports this
A Results Framework in METRA GET is a hierarchy of logframe items (goal, outcome, output, activity), each of which can carry indicators. An indicator is defined once with a unit, a level, and — where it applies — a disaggregation scheme, and that single definition is what every report, dashboard and export reads from.
Indicators can be manual (a number a user enters each period) or computed from a linked dataset or form field, so the same indicator never has two different calculation paths inside one project.
From concept to your own project
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MEL & Results
More in this category
What is Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning (MEL)?
Monitoring, evaluation and learning are three related but genuinely different activities. Confusing them is one of the most common sources of weak programme reporting.
Results-Based Management: from Goal to Activity
A Results Framework is a hierarchy of claims about cause and effect. Getting the levels right is what makes a programme genuinely measurable.
What is an indicator?
An indicator is a specific, measurable signal that a result is (or is not) happening — not the result itself, and not a vague aspiration.