Strengthening global human rights advocacy through MEAL: WITNESS’s experience with Humentum

Emmma Mitra, one of the Digital Project Managers at WITNESS, plays a pivotal role in a global organization that elevates individual and community voices by using video and technology to protect and defend human rights. Recently, Emma and her colleagues participated in the Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) Dpro course, which has significantly influenced their approach to their critical work. In this blog Emma shares how Humentum’s course provided them with flexibility, relevant material, and practical methodologies that significantly enhance their work process to better support the communities they work for.

Q: Why did you or your organization decide to participate in the MEAL DPro course? What were your goals? 

A: There were three people at WITNESS who participated in the MEAL course, and we had both personal and professional objectives for taking part.  We wanted to evaluate our monitoring and learning processes at WITNESS. We were coming towards the end of a three-year work plan, and we had our own processes for annual, midpoints, and end of projects set up. But we felt that as a growing organization (we tripled in size) it was time to revisit some of those processes and find  new [information] to learn from. We also knew that we had an idea about best practices, but that we also had experience in a variety of organizations and worked with funders who had a wide variety of requirements. So, we wanted to extend our knowledge, learning and experience and bring that into the organization, and share it so that in our program and senior leadership teams we could use good case studies and the experience to help shape what might become our new MEAL processes at WITNESS.

Q: How did you all arrange your schedules to fit the course into your busy everyday life? 

A: WITNESS is a global organization. We have teams from all over the globe. Therefore, we are working in different time zones, and all have different responsibilities outside of work. That meant that we needed a flexible platform. The course gave us the opportunity to follow the same modules, but to participate when we could. There were a couple that were quite intense in terms of the material to go through, but we were advised on how much time we’d want to apportion to successfully do the course. So it became a lot easier for us to manage.

Q: What did you find the most helpful and valuable from the training? 

A: That I could jump in at any time and catch up on what I had missed. Because there were some competing demands. I work in an operations team within WITNESS, and so there are a lot of reactive pieces of work that I have to do. Some of that took me off schedule with my MEAL course. What I found helpful in it is that I could jump in and still feel part of a conversation that had been going on around the learning from all the other cohort members.

What’s great about the courses, too, is that you’ve got people from all over, different types of organizations, different job descriptions, and there’s a healthy, exciting chat that goes on. So, I found being able to come into that good because as a solo learner at home, it felt good to go in and see a conversation. We all found we were given relevant case studies to apply the learning. And the tutor provided lots of external references to go and look at that applied to what we were being introduced to. There was a wealth of stuff, a lot of things that we could go to look at. I think that that’s what we liked the most.

One of my colleagues said it was great to focus specifically on monitoring and evaluation around creating your outcomes and outputs in your evaluation work and monitoring. There’s a methodology, a formula for writing those, which we’d always struggled a bit with. Being able to get used to that methodology and formula that was shown to us was brilliant because it kind of empowered us to come away and go, “Oh, I’ve got it now.” Sometimes these things, particularly when you have to write in a certain way for a funder and it’s different than how you might express yourself within an organization, it’s a switch of language really.

Q: What will WITNESS be doing differently moving forward as a result of this course? 

A: We are now about to start our new fiscal year, so we’ll be starting our new work plans for the year ahead. All of us are looking at our current monitoring and evaluation processes, and we have introduced different resources for our teams to use that help, use this language around outputs and the outcomes of the projects that we’re planning to do. We’ve been able to think about how we do [MEAL] internally, but also how we’ll be talking to our external partners and activists that we work with.

There’s lots of practices that we would use when working with our external partners and activists on the ground and those working in the community. Through doing this, we learned different ways about how to collect data from people, but not in the typical way of data collection, more like actual conversation and feedback in different ways. It’s something we had done anyway because we have great relationships with the communities that we work with, but it gave us fresh ideas. We have some standard practices that we always do, and doing this enabled us to see fresh ways that we can collect evaluation and feedback from communities in a slightly different way. We already had quite a lot of evaluation that we weren’t putting into our official documents. So, I think the training we did will influence the practices that will now happen over the next fiscal year.

We also have two new senior members of the team at a high level who are leading monitoring and evaluation processes. Us having done this course just before they arrived at WITNESS gives us the ability to be of support to them and share the practices we are using. So I think that the best thing the course has given us is that there are now three people at WITNESS that have this additional element of learning around monitoring and evaluation that we can share with the team and say, “This is what we do already, but we saw this, or we learned this in this module, and this kind of work could be useful for us.”

Q: How has the course helped you adapt to local contexts and cultures? 

A: We are a global organization, speaking many different languages and culturally, we have different ways of doing things and expectations within the cultural needs of the countries we’re in and the people we work with. Doing this course has been great to think more about that and be able to apply different processes that actually align and support the communities we’re in, rather than trying to fit everything into an institutional voice for a funder, for example.

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