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MEL Sandbox | Between Prediction and Emergence - Practitioners' Takes and Tactics

UNDP Innovation
652 subscribers
359 views 10 months ago
UNDP SMLE and The Convive Collective are excited to invite you to our upcoming online MEL Sandbox session! At the Sandbox, we have been hearing from MEL practitioners how balancing accountability and learning can be a key tension/opportunity for improvement within the sector. Equally important and significant is the relationship between predictability and emergence. Practitioners often navigate and negotiate between two paradigms: The predictable world in which funds are secured and reported, driven (more or less) by:  …...more
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MEL Sandbox | Between Prediction and Emergence - Practitioners' Takes and Tactics
8Likes
359Views
Sep 302024
UNDP SMLE and The Convive Collective are excited to invite you to our upcoming online MEL Sandbox session! At the Sandbox, we have been hearing from MEL practitioners how balancing accountability and learning can be a key tension/opportunity for improvement within the sector. Equally important and significant is the relationship between predictability and emergence. Practitioners often navigate and negotiate between two paradigms: The predictable world in which funds are secured and reported, driven (more or less) by:
  • desire to focus energy/resources on clear, ambitious goals
  • defined linear causal relationships between interventions and outcomes based on research and experience
  • predictions of the kinds of changes that will occur from interventions based on research and experience
  • measurable, time bound, indicators of progress towards those results for which grantees are held accountable
The emergent world in which funds are spent on implementing programmes, projects, initiatives, driven (more often than not) by:
  • events, drivers, actors outside your control
  • experimenting with ways to disrupt or reinforce parts of the system
  • a lower expectation to understand or capture contribution towards change
  • unexpected turns of events, development of drivers, (inter)actions of actors that render the best-laid plans irrelevant or impossible or that yield unexpected effects of your actions and that present new opportunities to influence positive outcomes
To explore this tension, we will hear from Tibemanya Ivan, MEL expert with 15+ years of experience and currently working as the Regional MEL Manager for Africa at the International Republican Institute where he is leading MEL efforts across 25 African countries, and Howard White, Director (Research) at REC, and Professor of Evidence-Based Public Policy at the Centre for Evidence-Based Social Sciences, Lanzhou University. He was formerly the Director of Evaluation and Evidence Synthesis at the Global Development Network, and the founding Executive Director of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie). Steering this conversation alongside UNDP SMLE will be Katherine Haugh from the Convive Collective, a long-time thought leader and expert in the philanthropic sector focused on philanthropic change, writing, and speaking about how philanthropies can unlock and measure their impact through strategic learning.

Follow along using the transcript.

UNDP Innovation

652 subscribers