Explore the power of Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) with specialist Kandi Shejavali - part 1

I’m taking the opportunity side of this question to first mean the biggest opportunities presented by M&E, okay?

The biggest opportunity presented by M&E is the enormous potential that it holds to bring us closer to the type of society we want. To me, that’s what M&E is about. It’s not the techniques or tools or graphs and numbers. None of that means anything if M&E system-generated evidence isn’t used to inform decision-making so that projects are not only steered in a way that maximizes intended results but, more broadly, so that projects are designed to be beneficial for people and the planet in the long-term.

This is especially relevant now in the context of anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss. I believe that evaluative judgments made through M&E activities have to be arrived at through this lens. M&E has to step to the plate and “help envision and articulate [the type of society we want] and then help chart a path to making it a reality”.

That might seem like wishful thinking, but this isn’t a pipe dream. There are many interesting discussions being had on related topics, as can be heard on podcasts like the GIIN’s Next Normal: Re-imagining capitalism for our future. The opportunity is there for M&E to play an incredibly important role to transforming society for the better! The revised DAC criteria can even be considered one step in this direction, but I think they are applied too late in the project cycle. In my opinion, they should be considered at the planning stage. 

So that’s the opportunity presented by M&E. 

In terms of opportunities in M&E for professionals, I’d say that independent consulting work is huge. There are so many opportunities out there. I can’t count the number of opportunities I’m invited to participate in that I have to turn down or refer to other people.

That’s why I’m committed to coaching M&E professionals and letting them benefit from this. My interest is in getting these opportunities to qualified people, ideally, people who live and work in or near the communities targeted by the project in question and who are committed to a decolonizing approach to M&E. I mean, why should someone like me be flown into a country to do M&E when a local professional could have the opportunity to earn income while doing an amazing M&E job that would more intuitively incorporate the local communities’ way of knowing and doing into the M&E activities?

I think we really have to commit to what ‘development’ means and ensure that these opportunities don’t keep going to the same people.

Turning to the biggest challenge in M&E, well, it’s sort of the flip side of its opportunity to bring us closer to the type of society we want, and it’s the same challenge faced in other fields and by humanity at large: how to bring an elevated level of consciousness into our work and thus catalyze transformative change. 

Eckhart Tolle once said “No change is possible without a shift in consciousness”, and I tend to agree. I’ve started to reflect on what this would look like in M&E practice, and I intend to explore it some more.

That’s actually the other reason I picked Nepal earlier as one of my favorite countries to work in. I felt an amazing sense of peace while I was there (it wasn’t just about the delicious momos, you see)… the zen in the air was almost tangible, and my soul felt very much at ease. I’d love to bathe in that atmosphere again, though of course, we can all cultivate such inner peace from wherever we are.

And the elevated level of consciousness that it represents is what I think the world needs each of us to uncover within ourselves in order to be more effective at truly transforming our societies for the better, including through our work, which of course includes M&E work.

On a more practical level (I know that the consciousness stuff can seem a little esoteric and ‘woo-woo’ for cartesian M&E types (laughs)), another challenge in M&E is how to measure project-specific results when projects typically operate within complex systems. Different parts of life are intricately interrelated, and things don’t work in the linear fashion that may be conveyed by a project’s theory of change (ToC). ToCs have to be caveated, and, in conducting M&E, practical approaches have to be taken to credibly estimate – note, I said estimate; this is not a precise science – a project’s unique contribution to results that multiple other actors may be working towards as well.

Another challenge is measuring what matters. We have lots of measures that are lauded for being robust in a limited statistical sense (GDP, for example) and that are widely used. Yet, they don’t say much about how well we’re truly doing as living beings, as people and nature. I think measures such as Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness need to be used much more widely, with each country or community establishing its related targets and taking measures relevant to its particular context to meet those targets. Imagine the kind of societies we could create! We’d be rich in the way that actually matters.

And I guess a final challenge is that sometimes M&E is seen as a complex and onerous burden. I get it. But it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s why I seek to share my M&E skills in a manner that’s straightforward but allows for the resultant M&E to be robust.