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This Green Paper intends to review key elements of the problem that Development actors will confront as a new decade opens up ahead of us. It will articulate a solution that we believe should become an inherent feature of Development programs and initiatives. This is the outcome of an intense period of experiences and reflections in the Development space across different geographies and institutional mandates and activities, during which the Foundation has collaborated with institutions such...

This guide has been developed to help build confidence and capability, distilling useful tips and considerations that may help teams think through programme delivery issues and interpret elements of the PrOF Rules. This PrOF Guide lays out: - The definition of beneficiary engagement. - The case for beneficiary engagement. - FCDO’s approach to beneficiary engagement. - Practical tips for how to integrate beneficiary engagement throughout the programme cycle, including guiding questions to...

- The United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)’s standard economy, efficiency, effectiveness/cost-effectiveness and equity (4E) framework is still relevant for approaching, measuring and managing value for money (VfM) for adaptive programmes. • However, this framework needs to be reframed to capture and incentivise flexibility, learning and adaptation. • VfM appraisal and reporting should be done in a way that draws on beneficiary feedback and informs good...

To mark 20 years of Outcome Mapping, this paper presents the core principles and concepts that are foundational to using the approach. It also presents a set of guiding practices to support transformative change. The OMLC Stewards presented the paper at a special webinar on 29th April 2021 - see the link below for the recording.

Essential points for practitioners and donors • Mediation offers a cost-effective and proven method for resolving armed conflict. Between 1985 and 2015, 75 per cent of armed conflicts in the world were resolved through agreement rather than by force. In most cases these processes will have involved third party facilitation or support. • Professional mediators understand the high stakes involved in their work to prevent, mitigate and resolve armed conflict. In addition, they and their...

The Cynefin Centre’s Citizen Engagement & Democratic Innovation programme provides tools for collective sense-making in the areas of community development and youth work; civic engagement and democratic innovation; collaborative service/policy design and evaluation; housing/tenant engagement; futures and planning; shared learning and peer to peer knowledge exchange.

This Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document is written for Small Foundation network partners. It accompanies Network Partner Evaluation Toolkit, which outlines four evaluation tools that Small Foundation is encouraging, and supporting, its network partners to use to improve their operations and, ultimately, increase their impact. This FAQ document answers typical questions about these evaluation tools and provides additional detailed recommendations for how network coordinators can...

Development cooperation has spent decades wrangling over the merits, evidence, and implications of what we may term “the learning hypothesis”: the idea that increased knowledge by development organisations must logically lead to increased effectiveness in the performance of their development activities. Organisations of all stripes have built research and monitoring and evaluation (M&E) departments, adopted a multitude of knowledge management systems and tools, and tinkered with...

What can middle-level theory do? Middle-level theory (MLT) has several uses in development planning and evaluation. „ It helps predict whether a programme can be expected to work in a new setting. „ It offers insights into what design features are needed for success. „ It provides invaluable information for monitoring to see if the programme is on track and to fix problems that arise. „ It reveals the causal processes and related assumptions to be tested in an evaluation and helps identify...

This paper lays out a series of steps people can take to create the new systems we need to meet shared, public challenges. Systems are ubiquitous and powerful. We rely on them to support our daily lives: every time we turn on a tap, flick a switch for electricity, drop our child at school, jump on a bus or visit a doctor we rely on a wider system. There is a widespread sense, among decision makers and citizens that in the coming decades society will need not just new products, software and...

There is a glaring gap and compelling need for approaches and methods that realign to new rigour through timeliness, cost-effectiveness, relevance and being actionable. Over the past few years, the Sanitation Learning Hub, in collaboration with the Government of India, Praxis, WSSCC and WaterAid India, have been developing Rapid Action Learning approaches. Multiple approaches have been trialled, with flexible formats, but the essential criteria is that learning is timely, relevant and...

Systemcraft is our applied framework to help leaders and organisations get started and keep going when faced with complex problems. It is built on our practical experience. It draws on a broad body of research, action and theory from the worlds of complexity thinking, systems theory, adaptive management, leadership development, social movements, development theory and beyond. Systemcraft has been designed to make systems thinking something any leader can apply when they find themselves faced...

This paper probes trends in the use of big data by a community of early adopters working in monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning (MERL) in the development and humanitarian sectors. Qualitative analysis was conducted on data from MERL Tech conference records and key informant interviews. Findings indicate that MERL practitioners are in a fragmented, experimental phase, with use and application of big data varying widely, accompanied by shifting terminologies. We take an in-depth...

Emerging technology is making monitoring, evaluation, research and learning (MERL) more precise and enriching data. However, this evolution is so rapid that it can be difficult to stay informed about the field overall. This paper presents examples of emerging technology that are most often used in MERL for development programs, describes the pros and cons of their use, and discusses technology and ethics concerns that practitioners should keep in mind. The paper covers new types of data...

Children end up in child labour as a result of many, often unknown or hidden, interactions between multiple actors and multiple factors within households, communities, and labour systems, leading to unpredictable outcomes for children and other sector stakeholders and sometimes resulting in the worst forms of child labour (WFCL). It is a complex problem, and interventions aimed at tackling it are also, inevitably, complex and challenging. The way they influence change is non-linear,...

This paper explores the peer-reviewed evidence base of “traditional” technology-enabled monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning (MERL Tech) in international development assistance from 2015 to 2019. The authors conducted a scoping review that searched seven databases, screened 3,054 reference titles and abstracts, coded 886 abstracts, and extracted and analyzed conclusions and recommendations from the full texts of 256 studies. The findings reveal the most frequently reported...

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly shifted the context in which aid and development is being delivered. The global scale of the pandemic and the speed at which it is spreading mean that the ‘normal’ economic, ideological and organisational influences which shape (if not determine) aid delivery are in flux. This means that – for a relatively short-period – there is scope for aid actors to work collectively to embed more locally-led, politically-informed and adaptive forms of MERL in aid...

In September of 2014, USAID’s Office of Learning, Evaluation & Research (LER) awarded the Learning and Knowledge Management (LEARN) contract to Dexis Consulting Group and subcontractor RTI International.1 This document—the End of Contract Report—captures five and half years of results and reflections for our stakeholders. Our intention is to share the good and the bad, and while this report would not be considered a “tell all,” we think we have a story worth sharing, particularly to USAID...

Internal and external stakeholders have different information needs over a project’s life, for purposes that include adaptive management, accountability, compliance, reporting and learning. A project’s monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning, or MEAL, system should provide the information needed by these stakeholders at the level of statistical reliability, detail and timing appropriate to inform data use. In emergency contexts where the situation is still fluid, ‘informal...