Monitoring and evaluation are important for any dog population management programme. It is important to check whether an intervention is meeting its objectives, to assess your impact for dogs and the local community, and for accountability to donors and funders.

• Monitoring is the measurement of progress within an intervention. A chosen set of indicators are measured, to show the changes that an intervention is making.
• Evaluation is an assessment or an analysis of success at regular intervals during an intervention and when the intervention has ended.

ICAM has created guidance and a set of tools to help everyone involved in dog population management to build monitoring and evaluation into their programmes. These are:

• Are we making a difference? A guide to monitoring and evaluating dog population management programmes
• An online tool to help you choose your indicators
• Dog body condition scoring training
• Dog body condition scoring quiz

This guidance does not tell you how to plan or run an intervention; for information in designing and implementing interventions see our previous Humane Dog Population Management guidance.

Instead, this guidance aims to complement the previous publication by focusing on how to measure the impact of a dog population management intervention. We have included guidance on measuring and evaluating eight of the most common impacts that we feel are relevant to most DPM interventions. These are:

• Impact 1: Improve dog welfare
• Impact 2: Improve care provided to dogs
• Impact 3: Reduce dog density/stabilise dog population turnover
• Impact 4: Reduce risks to public health
• Impact 5: Improve public perception
• Impact 6: Improve rehoming/adoption centre performance
• Impact 7: Reduce negative impact of dogs on wildlife
• Impact 8: Reduce negative impact of dogs on livestock

If you’ve used these tools to help you in your dog population management programme, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch by emailing us at info@icam-coalition.org or using our online contact form.