i-APS integrated MEAL training systems can effectively contribute to your organization’s improved M&E performance and to greater impacts of your projects. Based on an assessment of staff needs, program requirements and organizational practices, i-APS provides tailored training to build-up the required skills in MEAL thinking, approaches and tools. Typical areas that we focus on are M&E capabilities and personnel roles; results and performance frameworks; indicators and their definitions; program/project reporting systems and their requirements; data collection approaches and tools; data management processes and quality control; and linkages with wider reporting systems. Covering these topics improves your personnel’s understanding of what works, what doesn’t, for whom, and under what circumstances. Through combined practical and theoretical sessions, our MEAL training instills relevant concepts, sensitizes staff to the need to strengthen data management functions, and provides your staff with the practical tools to improve performance and reporting to produce required quality information.
Impact, mid-term and performance evaluations are now an obligatory requirement of donors and national governments. However, doing them well is a serious challenge. i-APS begins work by developing a conceptual model, based on existing results frameworks. We reconstruct the project’s logic, and build up the theory of change. This leads to a clear view of the indicators to be applied, and where the information needed can be found. i-APS emphasizes those questions with highest relevance to client operations. Once defined, the variables of interest, such as activities and targets, outputs or results, and their outcomes and impacts, can begin to be measured. i-APS applies a well-tested toolkit of desk and field-based methods that includes appraisal of results-chain documentation; analysis of M&E system outputs; timeline tracking; and a range of quantitative, qualitative, and participatory instruments. We have found that it is key to tailor methods to each context, and to prioritize information needs, to avoid overburdening data collection and reporting. i-APS seeks to ensure that evaluations become a long-term learning experience for participants, donors and implementing organizations alike, that should unite relevant actors in consultative processes of data collection, validation of findings, and dissemination of results.
