The Community-Led Approaches to Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL) Research Grant was created in March 2022, with support from the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and the IKEA Foundation. This grant formed part of the Start Network’s push for a locally led humanitarian system and to meet the participation revolution commitment in the Grand Bargain, which seeks to promote the link between effective participation and the quality and effectiveness of humanitarian response.
The grant provided funding for agencies to develop contextually relevant, locally led, and community-centred approaches to MEAL. It aimed to ensure that Start Network members can effectively research, and develop, MEAL methodologies which ensure that people at-risk of, or affected by, crises, have more of a say in how impact and success are monitored, evaluated, and measured, in a humanitarian intervention.
The Community-Led Approaches to MEAL Research Grant sought to enable the creation of new methodologies or approaches to measure the success and impact of humanitarian interventions by centring the thoughts, opinions, and success and impact criteria devised by the people reached by the intervention.
This report summarizes key findings from seven START Networks members who implemented community-led MEAL projects.