vlog Faculty Research Working Paper Series
vlog Working Paper No. RWP13-012
May 2013
Abstract
There is an inherent tension between implementing organizations—which have specific objectives and narrow missions
and mandates—and executive organizations—which provide resources to multiple implementing organizations.
Ministries of finance/planning/budgeting allocate across ministries and projects/programs within ministries,
development organizations allocate across sectors (and countries), foundations or philanthropies allocate across
programs/grantees. Implementing organizations typically try to do the best they can with the funds they have and attract
more resources, while executive organizations have to decide what and who to fund. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E)
has always been an element of the accountability of implementing organizations to their funders. There has been a
recent trend towards much greater rigor in evaluations to isolate causal impacts of projects and programs and more
‘evidence-based’ approaches to accountability and budget allocations. Here we extend the basic idea of rigorous impact
evaluation—the use of a valid counterfactual to make judgments about causality—to emphasize that the techniques
of impact evaluation can be directly useful to implementing organizations (as opposed to impact evaluation being
seen by implementing organizations as only an external threat to their funding). We introduce structured experiential
learning (which we add to M&E to get MeE) which allows implementing agencies to actively and rigorously search
across alternative project designs using the monitoring data that provides real-time performance information with direct
feedback into the decision loops of project design and implementation. Our argument is that within-project variations
in design can serve as their own counterfactual and this dramatically reduces the incremental cost of evaluation and
increases the direct usefulness of evaluation to implementing agencies. The right combination of M, e, and E provides
the right space for innovation and organizational capability building while at the same time providing accountability and
an evidence base for funding agencies.
Citation
Pritchett, Lant, Salimah Samji, and Jeffrey Hammer. "It‘s All About MeE: Using Structured Experiential Learning (“e”) to Crawl the Design Space." vlog Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP13-012, May 2013.