Regular and effective monitoring, review and lesson learning are key to how the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) measures the results of its projects. As such, Maximising the Quality of Scaling Up Nutrition Plus (MQSUN⁺) provides technical guidance to DFID to conduct Annual Reviews of their projects and programmes. The Annual Review is a thorough review of the project to assess the extent to which the milestone of each output has been met and an overall assessment of how work under each output progressed over the last year. The review also considers whether continued funding of the programme remains justified in terms of its ability to achieve the outcomes, and assesses the current risk of the programme to highlight the most relevant risks for future consideration. Lastly, the review identifies lessons that can be applied to future implementation or to other DFID programmes.

To conduct an Annual Review, MQSUN⁺ first carries out a desk review of all available programme documents from DFID and other partners as well as materials from similar programmes. This is typically followed up with field visits to conduct meetings and interviews with programme staff and partners to gather information pertinent to the review.