How can donors and grantees work together to create effective monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) practices that drive field-wide transformation?
Andrea Azevedo
I’m Andrea Azevedo and I have been working as a MEL professional at different capacities and for a diverse range of organisations for the past 10 years (and counting!), including the UN System, funders and non-profits. I see more qualified conversations about evidence and impact as means to improve how we think and work for social justice. My main interests include complexity-based and equity-focused approaches to MEL and any discussion about nurturing a learning culture in social change organizations. I have MSc in Political Science from the University of Brasilia (Brazil) and a MSc in Development Evaluation and Management from the Institute of Development Policy (Belgium).
Contributed by this member
Resource
- This brief shares insights from the efforts of The Economic Justice Program (EJP) of the Open Society Foundations' Strategy & Impact Unit to develop a focused, principles‑driven approach to monitoring and evaluation.
- This resource, part of the MEL Toolkit for Grantmakers and Grantees, provides a simple discussion/interview guide to assess grantee capacity across several components of MEL.
- This resource is a theory of change example that was developed for an anti-corruption portfolio (2016–21); it includes standard theory-of-change components, such as outcomes and activities, as well as elements more specific to OSF’s longer-
- This guide provides a set of recommended steps for defining, refining, and integrating milestones while developing a theory of change.
- This resource is a portfolio close-out note that was originally developed for colleagues internally at OSF: It provides an overview of the portfolio (its aims, structure, and scope) along with reflections on key achievements and lessons lea
- This sub-strategy from the Economic Justice Program explicitly outlines the purpose of MEL within the program, along with specific goals and guiding principles.
- This resource is the form used by Open Society Foundations’ Economic Justice Program team to evaluate potential vendors to design and implement a new data platform for MEL.
- This tool is a presentation that the Open Society Foundations’ Economic Justice Program MEL team delivered to program colleagues to get them more familiar with MEL and suggest practical steps for considering it in their work.
- This resource is a compilation of three separate terms of references to support different components of evaluations of Open Society Foundations’ Economic Justice Program.
- This resource is the framework that the MEL team in the Open Society Foundations’ Economic Justice Program developed to compile, categorize, and make sense of a range of different indicators across the program’s grant-making portfolio.
- This resource is the template that the Economic Justice Program MEL team developed for the portfolio learning agendas of EJP's inaugural strategy.
- The MEL team in the Open Society Foundations’ Economic Justice Program created a special fund to support structured learning and collaboration between its existing grantees.
- These agendas, for grantee “MEL jamborees”, provide a detailed view of not only how an actionable learning event for MEL could be structured but also offer an insight into the interests, challenges, and opportunities facing grantees when it
- This resource outlines the menu of reporting options developed as an approach to reporting that was more flexible and clearer for grantees and provided more insights to program officers.