What is the Future of Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning?
The call to transform the power balance in development cooperation is growing ever louder. But much of the practices, language, frameworks (e.g. RBM) and power of monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) is rooted in the global North, far away from communities that development cooperation and assistance seeks to ally with and support.
MEL has also historically been an extractive exercise often overburdening local counterparts with administrative reporting for accountability purposes to donors and creating an environment of distrust between actors. How can we disrupt and abandon the colonial mindset embedded in MEL? Learn more about this webinar and those you’ll learn from through it here.
This recorded webinar, hosted by BCCIC, features practices, tools, tips and lessons learned that can inform your own MEL practices, as well as provide input on gaps and opportunities of feminist and decolonial approaches to MEL.
Meet the Panelists
Divya Hariharan is a passionate and versatile gender research, monitoring, evaluation,
and learning (MERL) specialist. With a Master’s degree in Gender Studies, she has over a decade’s worth of experience in the international development sector and has worked with governments, bilateral and multilateral agencies and foundations. Her focus areas include Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR), nutrition, gender mainstreaming, social protection, and livelihoods. Divya has demonstrated expertise in designing and executing MEL approaches and strategies while adopting a gender and feminist lens. She has worked with a variety of organizations on intersectional themes such as micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSME), women’s economic empowerment, humanitarian and disaster risk reduction, and building private sector capacity to measure impact and meet their Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) mandates.
Gurleen Grewal currently enjoys the great privilege of serving as Board Member and
International Development Communications Specialist with World Neighbours Canada
(WNC). She previously acted as Project Manager in Canada for WNC’s FIT-funded project: “Empowering Rural Women in Burkina Faso” In her various roles, she has engaged with the challenges involved in creating gender-sensitive indicators that are accessible and furnish adequate nuance. Gurleen is also a first-year student at the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Law. Before pursuing legal studies, she completed her MA in English at Simon Fraser University, where her research interests were in Black Studies, Discourse Analysis, and Gender and Sexuality. Her scholarship has examined how gendered and racialized forms of being interact to shape one’s lived experience: ways of knowing, being, and moving through the world.
Laura Parisi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies, University of
Victoria, and the current President of the Canadian Association of International Development (CASID). A feminist international political economist by training, her research and teaching interests are in gender and social inequality, international development, human rights, and globalization. Her most recent publications include an article entitled “Canada’s New Feminist International Assistance Policy: Business as Usual?” in Foreign Policy Analysis. She has also served as gender, human rights and development advisor/consultant to the federal government and a variety of NGOs/CSOs in the sector.
Deborah Simpson is a Scholar-Practitioner with a 30 year-career in the field of International Development. Beginning her work in the NGO sector alongside undergraduate and graduate studies she combines a practical approach with analytical training in Politics and Development Studies. After a 20-year academic career, including a DPhil in Development Studies at the University of Sussex, she recently returned to the NGO sector working with Oxfam Canada and CODE. Her areas of expertise include knowledge translation, gender analysis and programming, and Feminist Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning. She is also past-President of the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development.
