Training Next-Gen Development Practitioners in Agile Monitoring and Evaluation and Learning

This piece was written by Komal Bazaz Smith and Courtney Roberts, of the American University Graduate School of International Service.

The day we walked into American University (AU)’s sunlit, beautifully designed Graduate School of International Service building amidst pictures of famous politicians, storied academics and professors a great deal older than us, we knew Director/Emeritus Dean Louis Goodman had big plans for his popular Program Design, Monitoring and Evaluation course. We were among the new batch of adjuncts hired to carry out his plans to ready students in the latest trends in international development. As practitioners, Dean Goodman gave us carte blanche to completely revamp the curriculum and focus on new and emerging areas in the field. He indicated that ..."this would be part of a periodic overall review of IDP curriculum necessary to prepare students for future development challenges."¹  One of these new focus areas was what USAID calls collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA).  

CLA helps to ensure that progress toward development objectives is guided by continuous capture of data by all stakeholders and analysis of these data so that program staff and stakeholders alike can learn and iterate both program design and the type of data that needs to be captured. This process is often not linear and brings to light insights that emerge from the program context, stakeholders, or results (or lack thereof) from program interventions. The underlying idea is that iterative adaptation of program implementation is important to maximize results and to ensure stakeholder engagement, which is itself a very important result. The intent is to continuously assess the causal pathway to desired outcomes and adjust activities as necessary to yield the most effective course of action. 

And so, we began our teaching journey by adding an explicit focus on learning to the course. Program Design and Monitoring and Evaluation became Program Design and Monitoring and Evaluation and Learning. The syllabus morphed into something new and different and focused on things like adaptive program design, feedback loops in monitoring, ICT tools to facilitate gathering feedback, and delving more deeply into assumptions and in response to feedback to define and implement a learning agenda.

^{Image Credit: Courtney Roberts}

We challenged our students to use these innovative concepts when developing comprehensive monitoring, evaluation, and learning frameworks for the client organizations that we identified for their group projects. Many of the organizations requested that the students work on MEL frameworks for new projects or components of projects. This exercise represented an opportunity not only for students to learn to develop components of an MEL plan but also to challenge the client organizations to analyze their programming for gaps and identify areas for feedback to ensure that programming was meeting the needs of those that it we designed to serve.

For example, SunSaluter transformed into an organization focused on helping to nurture entrepreneurship and improve livelihoods rather than solely providing an innovative solar energy technology and access to clean water.  Noting the relevance of newly suggested evaluation questions from the AU project team around increased disposable income and entrepreneurship skills, Founder and Board Chair Eden Full noted that “programming shifts require changes to the MEL plan.” The AU student group identified the need to survey customers about more than just whether the technology was working. The AU team developed a robust and comprehensive updated MEL framework for SunSaluter that focuses on developing partnerships, on whether the power from the panels is leading to either increased productivity or increased quality of life both for the users of the panel as well as the entrepreneurs selling them.

Adding the emphasis on learning and adapting into the AU course as well as on the AU group projects yields possibilities for ensuring that programming outcomes are aligned with end user needs and are poised for greater impact than the more traditional, linear approach to international development. Ultimately, the hope is to equip future practitioners with innovative MEL techniques, and to harness these collaborative, adaptive, data-driven and agile learning approaches to drive better decision-making and practice—both at AU and in the field of international development. Customizing a solution proves to be a more effective way after all and the hope is, even the hardest cases will be able to use this approach of MEL and CLA and head towards a productive and impactful future.