The ideal monitoring & evaluation specialist: A character sketch

Gone are the days when it was okay to dish out huge sums of money in the name of doing good. Today, international donors expect results, and they expect aid recipients to be accountable. That’s where monitoring and evaluation experts, and their impact assessments, come in. While there’s a heightened awareness of the need to showcase results, there’s also the danger of measuring for the sake of measuring, says Anju Malhotra. Malhotra heads up the research innovation and impact department of the International Center for Research on Women, an agency that has been spearheading women’s research since 1976. The former professor at the University of Maryland joined ICRW in 1998 after securing graduate and doctoral degrees in sociology and demographics from the University of Michigan. She was also an National Institutes of Health post-doctorate fellow at the University of North Carolina. “After some time I felt that I could not just be an academic whose main goal was to publish sort of more basic science studies,” she said. “I’m more interested in research on what’s happening in real lives, real situations in developing countries in particular.” Who exactly fits the mold of a good M&E and impact assessment specialist? Devex caught up with Malhotra to find out. What advice would you have for individuals looking to make a career in M&E and social impact assessment? What kind of training, skills and experiences should they pursue? It seems to me two different types of skills are very essential. One skill that is very, very helpful is ostensive knowledge of a particular area. You need to know something, at least content-wise, very, very, very well. So in my case, for instance, I pride myself that I know the issue of gender and population and economic development and reproductive development issues very well. I know them – I mean, there are lots of people who know them more deeply than I know [them], but I’m well-versed in them. I’m comfortable knowing the substance of that work. So I think one important skill, thing for young people who are coming into the field, is that they can be generalist, but they need to have some specialty. Something that they know really, really well. The second really important skill is some solid evaluation training. Some good understanding both of quantitative and qualitative methods that people have been using for doing impact evaluations as well as, you know, just performance monitoring and learning. How do we learn from programs? How do we assess that they work or don’t work? How do we assess why they work or don’t work? So some sound technical skills on evaluations are really helpful. But then a third skill that’s equally important is really good conceptual skills and being able to think outside the box; getting really good training in theoretical thinking and understanding contexts and larger-picture issues. Not getting stuck, being able to envision: What’s the bigger issue that we’ve been trying to answer after all? So that comes with really good academic training. But a lot of it comes with getting experience in the field to really understand, you know: What are the environments in which programs work? What is the ultimate goal of these programs? Who’s trying to do it? How do they fit into larger-picture issues? That kind of skill I think is very important. So I think people who are best at instituting impact evaluations and assessments are the people who combine the substantive, conceptual and technical skills. In your work, you assess complicated social and cultural dimensions of people around the globe to produce quantitative data that may ultimately have far-reaching implications on a donor’s funding decisions. Can you talk a bit about that? How do you strike a balance and communicate the nuances and strike a balance? You raised a very good point. This is always a serious conundrum for researchers, because those of us who are trained in research don’t want to let go of the nuance because the answers are very, very important. But at the end of the day we need to frame our research in terms of the decisions that need to be made. So we really need to look at, what is it that we want to happen because of the research that we’ve used? So, for example, we did a paper eight years back that looked at what is the progress on maternal mortality over the last twenty years. And really there were lots of nuances and there were lots of very specific issues, but at the end of the day the implication was that a lot more political will and resources need to be directed to the maternal health issue than there has been. And what are the two or three really results-based evidence that are needed to move that agenda forward? And that’s when you really need to push aside the nuance. Recently there was an article which shows that there has been some progress and it’s starting to become a point for [stakeholders]: What are the few specific kinds of things that are really making a difference on an issue that has been stuck for a long time? And now it’s time for some of the more nuanced information because it doesn’t have to [go to], probably, policymakers at the top level who are allocating resources. It probably has to go to the next level of implementers who are looking to see, ‘Well, should we increase the number of clinics? Should we increase the number of trained personnel? Should we increase women’s access to simple information about healthy deliveries?’ Now is the time to really dig in a little deeper. So really, the type of information we provide and the type of assessment we do has a lot to do with where the issue is in terms of what’s needed to move there. Read more international development career advice.