Learning and evaluation partner- Childhood Statelessness in the UK - European Network on Statelessness
Facilitating learning and reflection processes and evaluate European Network on Statelessness’ pilot programme on childhood statelessness in the UK with the team and their partners.
The Task
European Network on Statelessness (ENS) were conducting an 18-month pilot programme to research and better understand the rise in applications to register as British citizens by stateless children in the UK, map existing opportunities for awareness-raising and influencing, deliver training and engagement activities to improve access to rights and support for stateless children and young people in the UK, and to reduce barriers for stateless children and young people to register as British Citizens.
Our learning and evaluation partnership provided the ENS team with opportunities for facilitated reflection sessions, supported ENS to measure the impact of the project, and facilitate learning to inform future approaches by ENS and its members in the UK and at a regional level.
The process
We use a collaborative approach, support the ENS team to capture, analyse, and reflect on project progress and learning based on exploring the agreed key learning questions through:
Initial meetings to agree and refine the learning questions to guide the work and approach. A workplan, approach, roles and responsibilities and defined deliverables were all captured in a concise inception report.
Undertook a desk-based review of key documentation and supported ENS to develop a simple MEL plan and database for the project.
Facilitated an interim reflection workshop with ENS and their members on what has been learnt so far and implications for the project as they go forward. The reflections and ongoing MEL data was developed into a mid-term reflection report.
Undertook a light-touch evaluation which included two facilitated reflection sessions with ENS and their partners, key informant interviews and MEL data.
Developed a final learning report based on the pilot’s learning questions.
The Result
ENS had a collaborative learning partner to support them through the project, facilitate space to reflect and produced a final learning report which was used to inform discussions with funders about the next steps for its UK-focused and wider child rights work, to support organisation-wide learning and reflection during its annual planning process, organisation-wide evaluation and development of its new five-year strategic plan.
Project Lead: Joanna Knight
Team: Anna Beesley
Themes: Social justice; Theory of Change; MEAL framework; learning together; strategize together
"It was great to work with merl to create a MEL framework for our project that was realistic and manageable for us as a small, busy team. Being a pilot project, it was particularly useful to have an external learning partner to give us an additional perspective and support us and our members and partners to reflect on the work. merl were flexible and collaborative, enabling us to adapt the project in response to the challenges of the pandemic. We ended up with an accessible and useful final learning report that has informed our internal planning as well as discussions with funders about future work in this area." Nina Murray, Head of Policy and Research, ENS