Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning ( MEAL )
MEAL is a framework used primarily in the development and humanitarian sectors to enhance the effectiveness, efficiency, and impact of programs and projects. It goes beyond traditional Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) by adding the crucial dimensions of accountability and learning.
Here's a breakdown of each component:
1. Monitoring : Regularly collecting and analysing data to see how your planned activities and targets are progressing.
2. Evaluation : Carefully reviewing the quality of your work to understand how well it’s working, what value it brings and what impact it contributes to.
3. Accountability : Our commitment to make sure your work meets the needs of everyone involved, participants, and your own organization and donors.
4. Learning : Creating a culture where we reflect on findings from your MEAL processes to make informed decisions.
In essence, MEAL creates a comprehensive and dynamic system that helps organizations not only track progress and evaluate impact but also ensures transparency, responsiveness to stakeholders, and continuous adaptation and improvement based on the evolving context and lessons learned.
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22-09-2025 Measurements guide real-time decisions, help us understand what’s effective, strengthen long-term impact, and ensure accountability to the communities we serve as well as to our donors and partners. In this article, the authors share a method we use to measure program impact –...
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KoBoToolbox is a suite of tools for field data collection for use in challenging environments. Software is free and open source. Mostusers are people working in humanitarian crises, as well as aid professionals and researchers working in developing countries. Teams of developers and researchers...
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IndiKit was developed by the Czech organizationPeople in Need (PIN). It aims tomake monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of relief and development interventions easier and better- by helping humanitarian and developmentworkers to usewell-formulated project indicators and to correctly collectand...
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Causal Pathways seeks to help philanthropy and other funders open-up the black box of strategy and systems change by building awareness, will, and skills to use evaluation approaches that can make sense of causal relationships without depending on more traditional experimental and...
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BetterEvaluation is a knowledge platform and global community. Our vision is a world of better evaluation, better decisions, and better results for people and the planet.
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This course builds the capacity of development and humanitarian professionals in the area of Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL). Learners will increase their understanding of MEAL, test their new knowledge through case-based scenarios, and enhance their ability to track...
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Salanga has been partnering with Global Affairs Canada (GAC) and ADRA Canada to innovate on Community-Led Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (CoLMEAL). We have been piloting this approach in countries in Africa and Asia, including fragile and vulnerable contexts, by building the...
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Learning Lab is part of the International Department at DanChurchAid and serves as the host and facilitator of the Fabo Learning Community. We are a team of dedicated learning experts driven by a shared passion for transforming learners into confident knowledge-holders and practitioners. Using...
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20-01-2007 Nina Frankel, Anastasia Gage, Measure Evaluation, Updated 2016 Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is an essential component of any intervention, project, or program. This mini-course covers the basics of program monitoring and evaluation in the context of population, health and nutrition...
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- Janet Shapiro This toolkit deals with the “nuts and bolts” (the basics) of setting up and using a monitoring and evaluation system for a project or an organisation. It clarifies what monitoring and evaluation are, how you plan to do them, how you design a system that helps you monitor and an...
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By the end of the module you will be able to: Identify the 3 types of evaluation questions. Identify what makes a good evaluation question. Know difference between typical performance evaluation and impact evaluation questions. Break questions down into sub-questions. Use the design matrix as an...
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High quality monitoring, review, evaluation, and learning (MEL) ensures investments have a credible basis and can be used to make timely and important strategic and tactical programming decisions. It supports accountability, learning and, when implemented well, improves program effectiveness and...
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Our evaluation experiences matter – to ourselves and to those we engage with during the evaluation. But to what extent do these evaluations contribute to changing the lives of the people we work with? To what extent are evaluations useful? Can the findings be used and can evaluations be...
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This resource is designed to help groups working on community led approaches to climate change and energy conduct their own Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E). It aims to provide an accessible background to the principles of M&E, together with selected links to resources and approaches that...
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Data Visualization Introduction Outline: Waht is digital data Collection? The advantages of Digital Data Collection Challenges of Digital Data Collection Guide to Digital Data Collection Digital Data Collection Steps Top Open-Source Data Collection Tools and Research Case Studies
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Kaya is the global learning platform of theHumanitarian Leadership Academy. Here you will find both online and in-person learning opportunities, which arecompletely free to access. On Kaya you can access the following: Online self-directed courses and pathways MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses)...
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The U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Office of Food for Peace (FFP) funds development food security activities (DFSA) with an objective to improve and sustain the food and nutrition security of vulnerable populations. USAID applies the best available evidence to document...
- Resilience is a compelling concept for development and humanitarian assistance because it can enhance practitioners’ understanding of the complex dynamics that influence peoples’ ability to prevent and respond to risk. Incorporating resilience analytics into humanitarian and development...
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20-02-2022 The mission of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA) is to provide international humanitarian assistance, alleviate suffering, and promote human welfare to the world’s most vulnerable populations through partnership with U.S. or non-U.S....
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The Monitoring and Evaluation Capacity Assessment Toolkit (MECAT) is a set of tools that guide organizationsthrough a process to assess their current monitoring and evaluation (M&E) capacity, identify gaps, and plan ways to strengthen their M&E systems. MECAT uses four methods and...
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This volume is the last in a series of papers about systems approaches in complex environments, which includes the use of the collective impact model to address large-scale social problems, and the application of participant-driven MEL techniques across 17 networks of civil society organizations....
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Linking monitoring and accountability: This guidance aims to highlight the inherent links between monitoring and accountability. That is, monitoring enables evidence-based decision-making, which contributes to accountable practices. For example, if monitoring activities identify a problem with...