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Event Summary: Investing in Monitoring Evaluation and Learning (MEL)

A three-hour event was held to discuss the findings and implications of the research study: ‘Investing in Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning: issues for NGOs to consider’.

25/07/2014

Tuesday 8th July 2014, Amigo Hall, St George’s Cathedral
Report: http://www.bond.org.uk/investing-in-mel

A three-hour event was held to discuss the findings and implications of the research study:
‘Investing in Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning: issues for NGOs to consider’. This was
commissioned by the Department for International Development (DfID), Comic Relief, the Big
Lottery Fund, Bond and NIDOS. Seventy NGOs, including three case study organisations,
participated in a Q and A session after the presentations..

Itad’s Sam McPherson, was part of the team that researched and wrote the Investing in MEL report,
opened the event with a short presentation sharing its key findings, conclusions and
recommendations. The team found that most funding for MEL comes from restricted project
budgets, but this is rarely sufficient because NGOs fail to understand their full costs and/or fail to
budget for them. Committed leadership was identified as an important factor in those NGOs that
have invested their unrestricted income in the longer-term strategic development of MEL systems.

Read more about the event here.