M&E: Moving toward a culture of learning?

It’s not uncommon for monitoring and evaluation to be treated as more of a task than a tool or as a requirement instead of an integral part of project implementation and learning, as Michael Klein, director of International Solutions Group, recently pointed out. But “if you collect the basket of information that informs learning at all its levels, you’ll be able to extract from that the information you need to report effectively at any level, from an implementer to a donor, from a donor to their external stakeholders on up the chain,” said Keith Brown, senior vice president of programs at Management Systems International. It’s an ongoing battle to really pull people, managers particularly, into the learning process, Brown said. Organizations taking M&E seriously are often more inspired by a passion to improve their own work than by the newest global framework, and this means spending time to bring program staff and M&E staff together to be part of a strategic thinking team for each activity, according to Anne LaFond, director of the center for health information, monitoring and evaluation for John Snow Inc. “We emphasize action in the field … there’s this ethos of: If you’re doing something, you’re actually making progress,” LaFond said. But M&E systems, she suggested, need to enable those implementers to continue to make progress and also create space for them take time to reflect on what they’ve learned over three or six months and ask if the strategies they’ve put in place are making progress in the direction they hoped. There’s been a shift in the health sector, for example, to look much more at how systems perform and understand that the end goal is national health systems that can provide services to people over the long-term, according to LaFond. One of the areas that John Snow has been investing in is case study evaluation — prospectively in some cases and retrospectively in others — as a learning technique. Case studies help shed light on complexities and variables to find how they relate to each other and unpack the story of what’s happening or what has happened, LaFond said. “It’s increasingly difficult to collect data in places like Afghanistan, Iraq and South Sudan, which are unstable but also a hotbed of development activity with a wide span of funding and actors. For this reason, verification has become an increasingly important functional area inside the M&E world, said Brown, mentioning the use of remote monitoring. The health sector, LaFond said, is still struggling with M&E systems have been very linear — input, process, outputs and outcomes. “Somewhere in the middle is a process that helps us to learn, not just to report,” she said. Whether you’re a seasoned expert or budding development professional — check out more news, analysis and advice online to guide your career and professional development, and subscribe to Doing Good to receive top international development career and recruitment news every week.