Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL)

Welcome to the MEAL Track. This learning unit provides a comprehensive guide to designing, tracking, and evaluating social change programs by combining technical project management tools with Feminist MEAL (FMEAL) principles.

Rather than treating data collection as a top-down donor compliance exercise, this track equips practitioners to transform evaluation into an instrument of social justice and power redistribution. Across the modules, learners explore how to construct structured Performance Measurement Frameworks (PMFs) and Logic Models (tracing pathways from daily field outputs to national outcome pillars), while embedding Theory of Change conditional reasoning to navigate real-world complexity.

Concurrently, the curriculum shifts standard monitoring toward a Feminist Spectrum, centering the lived experiences of women, girls, and structurally excluded groups. Learners master practical strategies for downward accountability, adaptive learning, and decolonizing evidence, ensuring community members act as active co-evaluators and owners of project evidence rather than passive survey subjects.

Primary Course Takeaway: Master the technical tools needed to measure program performance accurately while embedding power-aware, community-led, and transformative evaluation practices across the entire project lifecycle.