This guide provides is written for people who want to design and implement a simple rangeland monitoring program in eastern Africa that is based on ecological principles and reflects the status of key ecological processes. It outline a series of steps that enable community members and other land managers to decide what, where, when, and how to monitor, as well as how to interpret and apply the results of their monitoring. It is based on a simple set of methods for monitoring plant and ground cover, gaps between plants, plant height, and plant density. It also provides instructions for collecting basic site information and observational data for interpreting monitoring results. The methods require only a pencil, a 1m stick, and a single datasheet, but generate data that are for the most part comparable with those collected using standardized monitoring protocols such as those applied by the United States National Resources Inventory (NRI).