Learning Together - Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Mentor to TheirWorld partners and staff
Theirworld teams and partners can bring their MEL plans and challenges to discuss and reflect together on how to address challenges and implement MEL activities as effectively as possible.
The Task
Theirworld recognise that capturing learning and impact is essential for organisations working to improve educational outcomes for children and young people in complex humanitarian environments. Building on 20 years’ experience of supporting innovative and scalable education projects, Theirworld commissioned merl to help their community continuously improve their approaches to MEL, through mentoring sessions for staff, teams and partners. The sessions aim to answer partners’ questions and help them improve the design and implementation of their MEL activities, leading to better education programming and outcomes for children and young people.
Theirworld is a global children’s charity dedicated to ending the global education crisis and unleashing the potential of future generations. The organisation brings together a diverse network of youth, social entrepreneurs, campaigners, businesses and researchers to ensure all young people have the best start in life, a safe place to learn and skills for the future.
The process
Theirworld teams and partner organisations are offered optional MEL mentoring, whereby they can bring their MEL plans and challenges to merl’s Director, Joanna Knight, to discuss and have space to reflect on how to address organisational or project MEL challenges or explore different methods and activities. Our approach to the sessions:
Identify up to three issues or topics to discuss and send through any background information.
Have a one-hour session to discuss the issues and discuss solutions together.
Provide follow-up notes, links to relevant resources and actions decided.
Follow-up sessions and document reviews if desired.
The discussions range from basic MEL processes to developing complex learning systems for organisations. Topics include:
Developing MEL frameworks and Theories of Change.
Evaluation questions, frameworks and deciding what methods to use.
Monitoring tools, particularly to understand educational outcomes.
Sampling approaches.
Qualitative and participatory methods.
How to triangulate and explore survey data in more depth.
Sensemaking with participants and other analysis techniques.
Gathering feedback, particularly from children.
Positionality, power and who creates the knowledge in MEL.
The Result
Using coaching techniques, we have collaboratively worked through challenges, to come up with solutions, signposted to resources and provide feedback on actions to over 20 organisations. Feedback on how organisations will build on the discussions and resources provided include:
The information provided will be used to improve learning and also designing projects. The session on evaluation and the need to be guided by evaluation questions will help in improving future project evaluation.
During the MEL mentoring session, our team received a lot of useful information. The main thing that we currently use in our activities is the proposed tools for collecting feedback from project participants. We are currently developing several new forms taking into account all the recommendations and hope that this will give us the opportunity to collect quality feedback. In addition, we are currently thinking about other suggested formats for collecting feedback and opinions of project participants.
It really helps us rethink as well as build on our MEL strategy and framework as we plan future project.
Project Lead: Joanna Knight
Themes: Theory of Change; MEAL framework; learning together; Mentoring; Education