Key Concepts

• Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) are all essential components of WASH programmes. All team members, including hygiene promoters, must ensure that MEAL is incorporated into the response and implemented in coordination with others working in WASH.

• MEAL should guide the programme, ensuring that it continues to be appropriate and responsive to the needs and vulnerabilities of the affected population.

• Monitoring M.2 is an ongoing process to check whether the programme is going to plan and to allow changes to be made quickly. It complements periodic needs assessments to identify the most vulnerable population and their needs.

• The purpose of an Evaluation M.3 is to examine what the project has achieved, whether it has achieved its stated goal and what changes have occurred as a result of the intervention. It can be carried out at various points in the project cycle. 

• Accountability M.4 aims to ensure that resources are used appropriately and transparently, WASH responders take responsibility for their work and communities benefit from efficient and effective programming.

• Affected people have the right to be involved in planning, implementing, monitoring and giving feedback. They are the best judges of the emergency response. 

• Participatory MEAL M.5 aims to engage men, women and children affected by a humanitarian crisis, ensuring that they are kept informed in a timely way and able to take decisions regarding the WASH programme.

• Drawing lessons learned from past and current hygiene promotion (HP) interventions in humanitarian settings can improve the quality of WASH interventions over time. It is important to capture and document best practices in HP, identify new challenges, disseminate information about innovative approaches and use the findings to improve future responses (M.6, M.7 and M.8).

 

Good Practice

• Include a budget and resources for MEAL in all HP programme plans. 

• Train and support capacity strengthening, if necessary, to ensure a good quality monitoring system and to support local authorities and service providers. 

• Develop a WASH Monitoring M.2 and Evaluation M.3 framework at the beginning of the programme with all stakeholders. The framework should clarify the information required, the methods needed to provide comparable evidence of change and describe who will be collecting the data, when, how and how often. 

• Develop the indicators required to measure the programme objectives as early as possible. Monitoring M.2 should be planned and systematic. 

• Use national or internationally recognised standards (such as Sphere) to support the identification of key actions and indicators that contribute to programme quality and Accountability (M.4). Depending on the focus of the programme, key indicators are likely to cover hygiene practices, WASH facilities (P.2, P.3, P.4 and P.5), community satisfaction and participation, market-based WASH programming P.8 and WASH-related health data T.17.

• Define a clear purpose for the data to be collected and the type of information required. Collecting quality data requires time and resources. It should be collected in the least intrusive way, ensuring that only information that will be used is collected. Irrelevant or poor-quality data is of little or no use; collecting too much information can contribute to population survey fatigue. 

• Collect qualitative and quantitative data from a variety of sources (triangulation) and analyse it using appropriate methods. 

• Disaggregate Monitoring M.2 and Evaluation M.3 data by age, gender and disability.

• Establish an inclusive, accessible, open and transparent system for the timely collection of feedback and complaints T.13 about the programme.

• Ensure that hygiene promoters have skills in active listening C.2. Hygiene promoters are the frontline workers with communities; active listening skills are essential for collecting data, showing an interest and being non-judgemental. Active listening reflects back what has been said to demonstrate that the listener has understood how people feel and what they have said: ‘ask, listen, communicate!’. 

• Capture and document best practices in HP to fill the existing gaps in knowledge and evidence (M.7 and M.8)  in the humanitarian WASH sector. Research, identifying new challenges and using innovative approaches is important, even in a complex humanitarian response, to learn lessons for subsequent responses.

• Collaborate and coordinate with others P.9 so that MEAL resources are used efficiently. An HP technical working group and/or community of practice are the main fora in a humanitarian response where technical and contextual knowledge exchange can take place between all the stakeholders