A monitoring, evaluation and learning system with national actors: Experience of the GPE KIX EMAP hub

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Use of outcome mapping and outcome harvesting in the Global Partnership for Education Knowledge and Innovation Exchange: challenges and successes

Proposal

After four years of implementing the Global Partnership for Education (GPE) Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX) project across 36 countries in the Europe, Middle East and North Africa, Asia and Pacific (EMAP) region, valuable lessons have emerged. A project that seeks to put national experts at the centre requires a non-traditional Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) system that contributes to this objective.

The GPE KIX MEL system—based on outcome mapping (OM) and outcome harvesting (OH)—supports the advancement of a key principle of the EMAP Hub—to be responsive to the needs of the education systems it serves. By capturing changes in practices and how they lead to project outcomes, this MEL system demands collaboration with national actors, making their perspectives the primary source of data and learning.

Implementing this system has presented challenges. OM and OH approaches require extensive and frequent data collection. The Hub works with numerous and diverse individuals supporting change across 36 education systems. Such stakeholders are often overburdened with existing responsibilities, leaving limited time to engage with MEL processes.

The “L” in MEL has proven essential not only for learning from the data but also for refining the MEL system itself. Addressing these challenges has required offering diverse MEL tools and processes that cater to different needs and capabilities. It also meant constantly improving the tools and processes to ensure they are context-sensitive and evolving with the project needs.

In a MEL system in which national actors are the main source of data, it is critical that they see the value of contributing to it. The Hub learned that the willingness to contribute to these processes depends on two factors: (i) how relevant stakeholders perceive the Hub’s work to be, and (ii) how much they perceive that their inputs contribute to learning and planning. To address these, rather than using data collection as a one-way, extractive process, the Hub has put in place formal and informal spaces to make sense of the learnings and collect inputs not only about intended outcomes but also about what is not working well and potential unintended outcomes. National actors are at the centre of such spaces, contextualising the data and brainstorming ways forward in improving project strategies.

This MEL approach has allowed the project to go beyond tracking progress to adopt an adaptive management approach towards the planning of activities. A series of needs assessments, feedback tools and processes allow the Hub to learn, through the voices of those it works with, about which strategies are most successful, for whom and under which circumstances. The planning does not depart from a set of pre-defined activities but instead from the outcomes that the Hub intends to achieve.

Although monitoring data remains essential for reporting, the key driver of the EMAP Hub’s MEL system is to facilitate learning and planning. This presentation will explore the opportunities and challenges of this MEL system and the necessary adjustments needed to ensure its feasibility and usefulness for all actors involved.

Author

• Marina Dreux Frotté, NORRAG