Youth Impact for Peace: Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning in Six European Youth Organisations

The research was a cooperative effort of the International Secretariat of UNOY Peacebuilders and five of its European member organisations, namely Service Civil International Service Civil International (SCI), The Peace Action, Training and Research Institute of Romania (PATRIR), Fundació Catalunya Voluntària (FCV), The European Intercultural Forum e. V. (EIF) and International Centre for the Promotion of Education and Development (CEIPES), supported by independent researcher and former UNOY staff, Celina Del Felice.

The research focused on understanding current processes and practices of Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) through a peer-review organisational assessment of the six participating organisations. 

Youth organisations all over the world are faced with on-going challenges on their daily work. One of these challenges is their organisational capacities concerning monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) practices. Considering the growing need and interest to improve such organisational capacities UNOY decided to engage in a long term, organisational development project, namely Youth Impact,  with the ultimate aim of improving the MEL practices of youth peace organisations. This research report is the result of the first phase of the project.

This report presents our findings, addressing the following questions:

• How do youth peace organisations monitor and evaluate their work and learn from it?
• What suggestions for improvement emerge from analysing MEL practices?

Broadly,this report provides a strong basis for better understanding of current MEL practices in youth peace organisations in Europe and what needs to be done to improve them.

This report is of particular interest to youth peace organisations, but we strongly engage anyone who is interested in the topic to take advantage of this very useful resource!

On top of our research, we are also developing a detailed assessment tool providing an insight into what constitutes a good MEL practice and we also aim to develop a set of practical guidelines to help youth peace organisations improve their MEL practices. We will be publishing both the tool and the guidelines by the end of July 2016! Stay tuned!

The research team welcomes comments and questions related to this report and welcomes people who would like to be actively involved in testing the MEL tool during the upcoming months. Please get in contact with [email protected].  

Original Source:UNOY