ABSTRACT
It is critical that financial constraints be identified at the start of the monitoring programme, so that trade-offs between costs and outcomes can be made in an explicit fashion. Ideally, the point of intervention of financial constraints should occur at the time that monitoring objectives are being identified. If this does not occur, there is the danger that stakeholders of the monitoring programme will have unrealistic expectations about the objectives that can be met, and may not realize the compromises that have been made in terms of the methodology, to meet the budget constraints. In such a case, uncertainty in the data (see Chapter 6) may mean that few if any of the original objectives are really met.
