Innovates Consultancy has developed strong expertise in Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning programs in fast-changing environments and created innovative approaches that support agile programming.

In the last 10 years, our MEAL team has become increasingly involved in the monitoring of large regional program portfolios, requiring the development of real-time result-tracking tools to support decision-makers in the adjustment of their strategies. 

In response to this growing need, we designed dynamic third-party monitoring & learning solutions to:

• Track progress made at a multi-country / multi-sector level in real time
• Aggregate, visualize and cross-analyze tangible outputs delivered by large portfolios
• Monitor activities in real-time and analyze the relevance and initial effects before making formal mid-term and end-line evaluations
• Integrate results, lessons learned, and best practices into programming (feedback loop)
• Integrate contextual changes and key socio-political trends
• Bring these analyses to the level of project managers and decision-makers

These are designed to facilitate results management and cross-country analysis, strengthen strategic planning, and promote more effective communication.

The areas covered include: –

• Monitoring: This system has been developed and connected to all implementing organizations and partners, allowing for indicators to be updated every quarter and for the production of customized reports and data visualizations analyzing outputs and outcomes, to track progress made and analyze regional trends based on relevant data.
• Learning: Collating qualitative evidence of effects and facilitating the uptake of lessons learned for future program design and implementation. Innovates is developing qualitative case studies on a sample of projects to better analyze the reasons behind successes and challenges met by individual projects and to capture best practices and lessons learned, to be shared and directly incorporated into project design enhancing real-time learning.
• Technical assistance and capacity building: Innovates is conducting a review of the portfolio’s existing logical frameworks and monitoring and evaluation systems, working closely with organizations and implementing partners to strengthen projects’ results frameworks and theories of change and improve their alignment with donors’ overall strategy and objectives. This component also includes strengthening the capacity of project M&E teams based on needs identified at the project level.