“Plan to Achieve”: Creating Innovative MEL Tools to Integrate CLA in the Indicators’ Performance Management of Business Egypt Activity

Egypt has suffered persistent economic turmoil—conditions which continue today to hinder the country’s post-pandemic recovery. This volatility poses acute challenges for the country’s micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) which comprise the vast majority of Egyptian private enterprises. Despite external instability, Egypt’s private sector will recover if these enterprises can grow, create jobs, and adapt to market changes. To support this growth, USAID Business Egypt (BE), a five-year program implemented by DAI, seeks to increase MSME revenues, investments, and employment. 

As BE navigated economic turbulence in its first year of implementation, the project team initially struggled with linking performance indicator to their program activities to support MSMEs. This lack of clarity reduced their ability to collaborate and adapt programming to changing implementation realities. To address this challenge, through an iterative, learning-oriented process, BE’s MEL Director led the creation of the Plan to Achieve Tool (PAT), a tool and processes that have engendered a systemic shift in BE’s culture toward CLA, grounding programmatic decision-making in high quality monitoring data. For future teams seeking to resolve similar MEL challenges, success of the PAT offers lessons in how to determine an issue’s root cause; design an adaptive, user-oriented solution; achieve stakeholder buy-in; and cultivate long-term, structural improvements in project performance management.