Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning, & Change (MELC)
We provide innovative solutions for clients working in highly dynamic operating contexts.
The heart of our work lies in the collection, analysis, and display of data that can drive rapid decision making, programme adaptation, and continuous improvement.
We also provide innovative solutions for clients experiencing dynamic change. We focus on the precise organisational dynamics that enable people to achieve common goals and provide tools to align behaviours, attitudes and skills with these goals.
Monitoring
Monitoring includes the collection of data from diverse activities and people, engaging communities and individuals throughout delivery cycles, and ensuring that any and all evidence is actionable. This is front-line, real-time performance intelligence.
This is the foundation for how we engage with affected populations, working with them to make sure that activities are on track and that they can reduce their vulnerabilities.
We use mobile digital data collection and real-time dashboards to ensure quality and timeliness.
The level of performance monitoring is like a fire brigade. We spot smoke and ring the alarm. We get people moving to fix things fast, to determine if there is a fire, how to put it out, and how to prevent fires in the future,
Evaluation
Ideally, evaluations draw from the questions and issues that arise from monitoring . Thye address why the same fires keep getting set and how to prevent them in the future.
Evaluations use robust methodologies and experts to delve into these issues and determine actionable insights for the short, medirum, and long terms.
We have conducted programmatic, strategic, impact, and other innovative evaluations with a range of clients and sectors and in the most complicated operating contexts in the world.
Learning
Identifying lessons, comparative advantages, and strategic imperatives allow humanitarians to understand what works, what doesn’t and what needs to change.
This includes training on how to use performance frameworks (theories of change; log frames; monitoring architectures; evaluation methodologies) to guide operational performance at each step.
Importantly, learning doesn’t happen best in a classroom or offsite workshop, as entertaining as those may be. Learning happens in the moment, while we’re delivering, so long as we’re alert to how we do things and how we can do them better.
This is the heart of action based learning that underpins all our work.
Change
Everything above should produce effective and positive changes, from immediate insights from monitoring (“putting out fires”), to design and operational insights from evaluations, to how programmes are adapted to meet new and emerging needs.
Positive change is the driver of improved performance and so it is integral to all aspects of our work.
