Here are all the course notes for you to download / print. Other resources will be presented as Field Notes in the relevant lessons.

MEAL in Action: Introduction

Welcome to this training on MEAL in Action. Through this course, you're going to experience what MEAL actually looks like when plans collide with reality.

You're going to take the role of a MEAL Manager for a women's economic empowerment program in rural Kenya, working with 2,000 women across 15 villages in a 24-month pilot program.

This is a simulation. You'll face real decisions and dilemmas, and you'll see the consequences of those decisions. At key moments, we're going to explore some of the frameworks and principles that matter in practice.

Some of the choices may be difficult or uncomfortable—but that reflects reality, because MEAL in practice can be messy.

Your Role

You are the MEAL Manager for a Women's Economic Empowerment Project. The program delivers:

• Skills training: financial literacy, business management, vocational skills like poultry keeping, improved farming techniques for drought-resistant crops, vegetable production, food processing
• Village savings and loan groups
• Market linkage support to sell products—eggs, vegetables, dried goods, poultry, farm produce

Scale: 2,000 women participants across 15 villages over 24 months (two full agricultural cycles)

Target outcomes:

• Increase women's monthly income by 40% by Month 24
• Improve financial decision-making power in households

Your challenge: Design the evaluation approach before Month 1, then use it when reality doesn't go as planned.

The Stakes

This is a two-year pilot testing the model before potential scale-up. Your donor is considering: Should we invest $20 million to scale this project to 50,000 women nationwide?

That means your MEAL job isn't just to hit 40%. It's to find out:

• What works and what doesn't?
• Which women succeed and who gets left behind?
• What conditions determine success?
• What needs to change before scaling?

In a pilot, learning is the product. The 40% target matters, but understanding why you hit or miss it matters more.

Designing Your Evaluation

You're about to design an evaluation for this major program. Your donor wants results—but you can't evaluate everything. You need to be strategic.

Before you decide what to measure or how to measure it, you need to ask: What questions are you actually trying to answer? This will shape everything else—your indicators, your methods, your data collection.

Primary questions (Did it work?):

• Did income actually increase?
• Did decision-making power change within households?

Secondary questions (Why or why not?):

• What worked best? Which interventions were most effective?
• What were the barriers to success? What enabled success?
• Who did the program actually work for, and who got left behind?

Process questions (How did we learn and adapt?):

• How did implementation work?
• What adaptations were made along the way?
• What did we learn?

Reflection Questions

1. Think about a program you're currently working on or have worked on. What are your primary, secondary, and process questions? Are they clearly defined—or have you been evaluating without them?
2. If your program is (or was) a pilot, how well did the MEAL design capture learning about what works where and for whom—versus just reporting whether targets were hit?
3. What's one question you wish you had asked at the start of a past evaluation that would have changed how you designed it?