There has been a paradigm shift in terms of research planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and upscaling in agricultural research and development. The previous procedure of little involvement of wider key stakeholder participation in this process ended up entrenching inherent biases that also led to entrenching rural poverty. Therefore, there has been a need to invert the paradigm from top-down to bottom-up approaches to enhance farmers’ participation so that they become more proactive in agricultural research and development process. Also, the indicators that are used at the grassroots rarely incorporate interests and/or knowledge of the communities. Therefore, this study was designed in Central Kenya to understand the farmers’ perception of monitoring and evaluation and build their capacities in development of monitoring and evaluation indicators that would empower them to assess success or failure of projects that they jointly implement with other stakeholders. This process was subsequently meant to influence research through feedback mechanisms and increase adoption and development of appropriate technologies that would create impact at the grassroots level for improved livelihood and poverty reduction. A farmers’ group involved in soil and water management was selected as a case study. The results indicate that wider stakeholder participation empowers them to create relevant feedbacks that inform research to develop appropriate technologies and accelerate impacts to improve livelihoods. The results also show that farmers have knowledge and capacity to develop frameworks for monitoring and evaluating projects, making them more relevant to the communities’ reality.