How to better engage communities in design, monitoring, evaluation and learning

Engaging and empowering local stakeholders to lead development projects in their own communities is widely accepted as the most logical and ethical approach to take. However, funding constraints, old mindsets, and practicalities often stymie good faith efforts. Lauren Serpe, Deputy Technical Director of the Learning Evidence and Impact Team at Pact, suggests four approaches the international development monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) community can continue to champion to better foster community-led programming as our industry strives to be better and true partners with our community counterparts:

1.Promote the mindset that evaluation can also be an intervention
2.Ensure culturally responsive evaluations
3.Utilize empowerment evaluation approaches and
4.Encourage using highly participatory complexity-aware MEL method