Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning

Navanti is currently the implementer for the USAID/Nigeria MEL Support Activity, providing assistance related to field-based monitoring, evaluations, knowledge management, and collaborating, learning, and adapting (CLA).

Monitoring

Navanti has a long history of conducting Third Party Monitoring (TPM) for a range of development and governmental actors across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In non-permissive environments, Navanti’s researchers can access places safely and ethically to assess the conditions or progress toward a development project outcome. Even when the context is more stable, Navanti can be an independent, unbiased verifier of progress made and the context as it exists in a way that development actors and especially those managing the programs may not be able to. Finally, while program managers strive to do as many site visits as possible, Navanti can magnify the ability of its clients to monitor a much large set of activities given its extensive networks.

Countries in which Navanti has conducted monitoring: Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq, Mali, Mozambique

Evaluation

Navanti also has extensive experience in conducting evaluations for a range of international partners. Evaluations can serve a range of purposes depending on when they occur.  Generally the goal is to learn about whether an intervention was effective and how and why/why not to apply to the existing intervention if the evaluation is done in during the implementation or for future interventions and the broader community of practice when conducted at the end. There are many approaches to evaluation, and which are most appropriate often depends on a range of factors including the nature and scale of the intervention and how sites were chosen, the permissibility of the context, the complexity of the context, amount of funding available for evaluation, and the purpose of the evaluation. While having experience using many different approaches, Navanti specializes in those that are most useful in complex contexts where causality is contested and counterfactuals are unavailable.

Countries in which Navanti has conducted evaluations include: Chad, Niger, Cameroon, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Nigeria

Learning

Navanti facilitates learning for its clients in various ways. When taken together with monitoring and evaluation, Navanti helps clients learn from the evidence produce and use it to apply to adapting programming and activities. Additionally, Navanti helps clients identify gaps in their knowledge and skills and puts together learning events, whether peer-to-peer learning around a common problem or training in a topic of shared interest for communities of practice. Navanti also helps clients engage in ‘pause and reflect’ exercises both formally and informally to allow for learning and course correction. Other learning work Navanti has conducted includes hybrid remote/in-person training of field teams for focus group discussions, semi-structured key informant interviews, quantitative survey sampling and administration, other data collection instruments and e-learning module development.

Specifically within the USAID context, Navanti helps Missions and their implementing partners use the Collaborating, Learning, and Adapting (CLA) framework to improve effectiveness and produce development outcomes.

Countries in which Navanti has conducted learning-related work: Morocco, Tunisia, Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroon