Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL)
Evaluation was born on the seventh day of creation, when God saw everything that He had made and stated, “It is good”. With that single phrase, God became the world’s first evaluator. However, the evaluation born in the heavens proved insufficient and too subjective for some. Therefore, upon hearing God’s evaluation (self-evaluation, by the way), the Devil objected and insisted: “How does he know it’s good, how did he measure it? By what indicator did he judge the goodness of his creation, by what did he compare it?” And so, evaluation as we know it today was born: in the fires of hell!
(Karen Marie Mokate, Turning the “monster” into an ally: Evaluation as a tool for social management, Inter-American Development Bank, 2003).