Specialist short course

Develop your skills to more effectively design and improve monitoring and evaluation systems supporting participatory and adaptive practice. 

Please note, we are also running a course in Using Participatory Action Research to Improve Development Practice for practitioners, consultants and researchers which explores participatory research more broadly – its principles, design and facilitation – and does not go in depth into evaluation. The Participatory Monitoring & Evaluation for Learning course is for project and programme staff and academics whose focus is evaluation.

Increasingly, development organisations are using complexity-aware, learning-based approaches to design and drive their monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems. This enables practitioners to better understand how change actually happens and how impact is achieved in real time in complex social change contexts. There is also growing awareness of the need for downward accountability and supporting greater feedback from those engaging in interventions to those designing and funding them.

Participatory processes can provide practitioners with key insights into how the changes they desire to support (the impact sought) unfolds through the experiences of those engaged directly in the change processes – often marginalised and hard to reach populations. Unlike linear M&E systems whose indicators tend to speak largely to upward accountability demand, participatory and systemic methods are widely recognised for their ability to deeply engage stakeholders at all levels.

This training course is delivered through a partnership between IDS, Voices That Count and Analyzing Development Issues Centre (ADIC), Cambodia.

ADIC is a leading Cambodian organisation on action research in the region. It has led a network of NGOs using participatory research and monitoring & evaluation (M&E) in the Tonle Sap region, building capacity for participatory development through training, mentoring and implementing several high-profile research and development programmes. ADIC collaborates with the University of Utah, USA, and University of Mahidol, Thailand, conducting participatory action research projects and community mobilisation, along with ‘on the ground’ impact evaluation.

This course brings together the deep historical experience with participatory approaches and methods that IDS has pioneered, with the rich experience of Voices that Count in building and using systemic M&E.

The course features frontier methods for quality implementation of participatory processes at scale (with large numbers of people and across broader geographical space) to support learning focused and complexity-aware M&E systems.

“It’s time we connected up participatory and systemic approaches to M&E, this powerful combination has the potential to seriously deepen our understanding of how change actually happens!” – Marina Apgar, Course Convenor

Read some feedback from previous participants of this in-person specialist course: