Decolonizing Monitoring and Evaluation

Hello!

After a long period of Covid-19 restrictions, we finally meet again to discuss decolonizing Monitoring and Evaluation in International Development. Sanjukta Moorthy, a Barcelona-based PMEL expert, will take us through a decolonized M&E workshop.

In this session we will discuss what it means to decolonize M&E, why it’s needed, and what the challenges are with the way we traditionally do monitoring and evaluation. Research is so often extractive, driven by questions or requests from donors, or paternalistic. In rare cases we see people from the communities gathering the data, but often it’s an external researcher, often white, always privileged, with a prescribed list of deliverables and targets. This can’t work any more. We are slowly improving and modernizing the way we do development and aid work, but as the humanitarian sector evolves, M&E is still holding on to methods that don’t fit our realities or even values.

Sanjukta will share some ideas for how we can move our industry forward, bringing participatory and intersectional methodologies into decolonizing, and innovating the way we do our work. We’ll discuss how these different ideas are interrelated, and how linking them can help us be more creative and connected with our work. We’ll discuss the ethics in humanitarian M&E and the role of race, gender, and power in M&E.

This format will be participatory, with a quick overview followed by a discussion – no decks, just a conversation. Please come prepared with questions, or examples of projects you would like to ‘decolonize’ and we’ll brainstorm together!

Bio:
Sanjukta (pronounced Sun-yuk-tha) is a planning, monitoring, evaluation, and learning consultant from south India, based here in Barcelona. She works with networks, donor organizations, intermediaries, and non-profit organizations. Sanjukta’s PMEL journey began at the Open Society Foundations, and she also has a background as a journalist.

Her consultancy work involves advisory support, capacity building, workshops, and trainings on key PMEL skills – like building a Theory of Change, mixed methods data analysis, and storytelling. She aims to demystify PMEL by making it interesting, fun, and engaging – training sessions use examples from other industries like journalism, and pop culture references! Her focus is on championing diverse perspectives, mixed methods and participatory research, and bringing human voices and our passion for social change back to our work. She builds sustainable M&E systems so that even smaller organizations without dedicated resources can analyse their impact and plan more meaningful projects.