MEAL fundamentals

1What does MEAL mean?

MEAL stands for Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning. These four functions answer four simple questions.

• Monitoring: are we doing what we planned? It is the continuous, regular collection of information on activities, expenditure and early results.
• Evaluation: is what we are doing producing the expected changes, and is it the right thing to do? It is a periodic, in-depth analysis, often at mid-term or at the end of the project.
• Accountability: are we answerable for our actions to the people we assist, to donors and to the authorities? It is achieved through information, participation and complaints and feedback mechanisms.
• Learning: are we using what we know to improve this project and future ones? Without learning, data sits idle in spreadsheets.

2Monitoring and evaluation: the differences

3MEAL in the project cycle

MEAL does not come at the end: it starts with the needs assessment.

1. Needs assessment: baseline data on the population, vulnerabilities and capacities.
2. Design: theory of change, logframe, indicators, MEAL budget (often 3 to 10% of the project budget).
3. Start-up: MEAL plan, tools, baseline study (baseline).
4. Implementation: activity monitoring, post-distribution monitoring, complaints and feedback, quarterly reviews.
5. Closure: endline study (endline), evaluation, documentation of lessons learned.

4Reference standards

• Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS): 9 commitments on quality and accountability to communities and people affected by crisis. Commitments 4 (communication and participation) and 5 (complaints) relate directly to MEAL.
• Sphere Handbook: minimum standards by sector (water supply and sanitation, food security, shelter, health), with reusable key indicators.
• OECD DAC criteria: relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability (covered on day 5).
• Donor requirements: each donor (ECHO, BHA, FCDO, UN agencies…) has its own reporting formats and mandatory indicators: read them before designing the system.

5Ethics and data protection

Collecting data on people in crisis creates a responsibility.

• Informed consent: explain who is collecting the data, why, what will be done with it, and that the person can refuse without losing assistance.
• Do no harm: do not ask unnecessary or traumatising questions, and do not expose people to risk (violence, legal status).
• Data minimisation: collect only what will be used.
• Confidentiality: anonymise, password-protect files, restrict access, never share lists of names via messaging apps.
• Children: consent from the parents and assent from the child, presence of a trusted adult, trained enumerators.

6Organising the MEAL function: roles, positioning and resources

A MEAL system is not just an officer filling in spreadsheets. It is a cross-cutting function that needs clear positioning, resources identified from the proposal stage onwards and a reporting line that protects its independence. Audits and evaluations regularly identify the same weaknesses: MEAL staff reporting to the project manager whose performance they measure, a MEAL budget that does not exist or is absorbed by other budget lines, and data that flows upwards without ever flowing back down to teams or to communities.

Position in the reporting structure

The most important principle is the separation between those who implement and those who verify. In a medium-sized mission, the most robust set-up is as follows:

• Mission MEAL coordinator or manager: reports to the head of mission or country director, with a functional (technical) line to the headquarters MEAL adviser. They set standards, validate tools, consolidate data and prepare reviews.
• Base MEAL officers: report line-wise to the MEAL coordinator, not to the base manager or the project manager. They work day to day with programme teams but are not accountable to them.
• MEAL assistants and enumerators: often recruited locally for data collection periods; they must speak the languages of the area and reflect the diversity of the population (female enumerators are essential for interviewing women in many contexts).
• Information management officer (IM): in large missions, manages databases, dashboards and data protection; in small missions, this role is taken on by the MEAL coordinator.
• Accountability or CFM focal point: manages the complaints and feedback mechanism; must have a direct line to country management for sensitive complaints.

Rule of thumb: if the MEAL officer is appraised by the person whose results they measure, the system is not independent. An auditor or an evaluator will point it out, and the teams know it.

Ratios and sizing

There is no universal standard, but the following orders of magnitude are commonly used by international NGOs to size a team:

MEAL budget

The range of 3 to 10% of the total budget seen in the core course must be broken down line by line. A credible MEAL budget includes: MEAL staff (often 50 to 70% of the MEAL budget), baseline and endline surveys (enumerators, transport, phones or tablets, printing), post-distribution monitoring, the complaints mechanism (phone line, airtime, boxes, training), the external evaluation (fees, travel, translation, validation workshops), tool licences and hosting, and training for teams and partners.

Donors only accept these costs if they are justified by the monitoring plan described in the proposal. ECHO checks the consistency between the monitoring and evaluation section of the Single Form and the budget; BHA requires a monitoring, evaluation and learning plan (MEL plan) whose level of detail depends on the duration and value of the award; FCDO expects logframe milestones to be verifiable at annual reviews. A MEAL budget that includes no baseline while the proposal announces outcome indicators is an immediate red flag for a proposal reviewer.

7Setting up a MEAL system in 90 days: a step-by-step method

When a project starts, or when a MEAL professional arrives on a mission that has no structured system, things must be done in a specific order. The sequence below matches what most donors expect in the first quarter of a 12- to 24-month award.

Weeks 1 and 2: understand the commitments

1. Gather the contractual documents: approved proposal, logframe, budget, general and special conditions of the agreement, reporting schedule. List every MEAL commitment: indicators, promised surveys, reporting frequency, planned evaluation, disaggregation requirements.
2. Read the donor requirements: mandatory key indicators (for example ECHO key results indicators, the indicators required by BHA for the selected sectors and sub-sectors), reporting formats, deadlines. For ECHO, the final report is due within three months of the end of the action; always check the exact dates in the signed agreement, because those are the ones that count.
3. Map what already exists: which tools are already in use, what data exists (multi-sector assessments, cluster data, health information system data), which partners collect what.

Weeks 3 to 6: build the tools

1. Write the performance indicator reference sheets for all logframe indicators (covered on Day 3). This is the most neglected and the most important step: it fixes definitions before everyone interprets them their own way.
2. Design the data flow: who collects (programme or MEAL), with which tool, who checks, where the data is stored, who consolidates it, and by what date it must be available.
3. Develop the data collection tools: digital forms, distribution registers, monitoring checklists, complaint form. Test them with the team.
4. Analyse data-related risks: a data protection impact assessment (see the next section) for any collection of personal or sensitive data.

Weeks 6 to 10: baseline and complaints mechanism

1. Launch the baseline before the activities have produced their effects. A baseline conducted in the fourth month of a 12-month project no longer measures a starting situation.
2. Set up the complaints and feedback mechanism as soon as the first visible activities start (registration, targeting), because that is when disputes arise.
3. Train the teams: programme staff, partners and enumerators, on the tools, ethics, consent and the reporting of sexual exploitation and abuse.

Weeks 10 to 13: validate and make it work

1. Finalise the MEAL plan and have it validated by country management and, if the agreement requires it, by the donor.
2. Fill in the first monitoring table with the baseline values and the first achievements.
3. Hold the first monthly data review with the programme team, with at least one recorded decision.

The success criterion at 90 days is not the existence of a 40-page MEAL plan, but holding a first meeting in which data led to a decision recorded in writing.

Allocation of responsibilities (simplified RACI matrix)

8Full example: launching the MEAL system of a multi-sector project

The following context is fictional. The international NGO "Horizons Partagés" is launching an 18-month project in the fictional province of Haut-Kessi, where 46,000 internally displaced people live in three sites and with host families in two municipalities. The project, funded at EUR 2,400,000, combines water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), multipurpose cash transfers and a protection component implemented by a national partner, the association "Femmes Unies du Kessi".

Step 1: inventory of commitments

Step 2: MEAL budget

The MEAL budget represents 8.9% of the total budget. The rationale to present to the donor: the project is multi-sector, includes cash transfers (which require stronger post-distribution monitoring and list verification) and operates partly among host families, which makes data collection more expensive than in sites.

Step 3: identified risks and responses

• Conflict of interest: the protection partner wanted to collect its own beneficiaries' satisfaction data. Response: satisfaction is collected by the Horizons Partagés MEAL team during quarterly monitoring; the partner collects activity monitoring data.
• Sensitive data: the protection component records individual cases. Response: case management data stays in the partner's system; only aggregated figures (number of cases by type, without any identifier) are reported to MEAL.
• Double counting: the same household may receive cash transfers and a hygiene kit. Response: a unique household identifier, and a "unique people reached" indicator calculated from the consolidated database rather than by adding up activities.
• Access: one of the sites is inaccessible two months a year during the rains. Response: the baseline is scheduled before the rainy season and remote monitoring by phone is planned for that period.

Step 4: first month of operation

At the first review committee (end of month 3), the monitoring table shows that 61% of households registered for cash transfers are female-headed, whereas the baseline estimates their share of the population at 44%. The team checks: the targeting criteria do indeed favour female-headed households, which is consistent with the vulnerability analysis. However, only 3% of registered people report a disability according to the Washington Group questions, compared with 11% in the baseline. The recorded decision: review access to registration sites (distance, standing in queues), train teams to ask the Washington Group questions and plan home registration for people who cannot travel. This is exactly what is expected from a MEAL system: a data point, a gap, an explanation, a decision.

9Data protection and data responsibility: the practice

The core course set out the principles. In the field, data protection comes down to concrete decisions: which field to remove from the form, who has access to the server, how long to keep lists, what to do when an authority asks for the list of beneficiaries. The references that frame these decisions are the ICRC and Brussels Privacy Hub Handbook on Data Protection in Humanitarian Action, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Operational Guidance on Data Responsibility in Humanitarian Action (IASC, 2021, revised in 2023) and, for organisations established in the European Union, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which also applies to data collected outside Europe.

Classifying data by sensitivity

Aggregated data is not automatically risk-free. The IASC guidance stresses the concept of demographically identifiable information: a map showing the concentration of an ethnic or religious group in a neighbourhood can expose that group, even without a single name.

The data protection impact assessment

Before any new large-scale collection of personal data (registration, household survey with contact details, biometrics), carry out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA). It answers eight questions:

1. What data is collected, and is each item necessary for a specific purpose?
2. On what legal or legitimate basis does the collection rest (consent, vital interest, public interest, humanitarian mandate)?
3. Who will have access to the data, inside and outside the organisation (partners, donor, payment service provider, mobile network operator)?
4. Where will the data be stored and transferred, and under which jurisdiction?
5. How long will it be kept, and how will it be destroyed?
6. What are the risks to people in the event of a leak, seizure or access by a party to the conflict?
7. Which measures reduce these risks (pseudonymisation, encryption, access control, separation of files)?
8. How are people informed, and how can they exercise their rights (access, rectification, objection)?

Consent in practice

Consent is only valid if it is freely given. Yet a person waiting for assistance does not feel free to refuse. The ICRC handbook stresses that, in many humanitarian situations, consent is not the most appropriate basis for the registration needed to deliver assistance; it remains essential, however, for surveys, interviews and photographs. A survey consent script contains: the name of the organisation, the purpose of the survey, the estimated duration, the voluntary nature of participation, the fact that refusing has no consequence on assistance, the right to stop at any time or not to answer a question, how the (anonymised) answers will be used, and a contact for any question or complaint. The enumerator records agreement in the form; if the person refuses, the form closes.

For children, a distinction is made between the consent of the parent or guardian and the assent of the child, which must be sought according to the child's age and maturity. For interviews with children, the Minimum Standards for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action (CPMS, Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action) require trained interviewers, a safe and visible space, and a referral protocol if the child discloses a situation of danger.

Pre-collection checklist

• Every question in the form is linked to an indicator or a decision.
• Names and phone numbers are stored in a file separate from the answers, linked by a code.
• Accounts on the data collection server are individual; no shared passwords.
• Phones are protected by a passcode and data is uploaded and deleted every day.
• A procedure exists in case a device is lost or stolen (report within 24 hours, account deactivation).
• A course of action is defined if an authority or armed group demands access to the data: hand over nothing on the spot, escalate immediately to country management.
• The retention period is set and destruction is scheduled at project closure, subject to the donor's financial record-keeping obligations.
• The data sharing agreement with the partner and, where applicable, the payment service provider is signed.

10The CHS in practice: what auditors and evaluators check

The Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (CHS) was revised in 2024 by the CHS Alliance, Sphere and Groupe URD. It retains its nine commitments to communities and people affected by crisis, rephrased from the perspective of those people, and sets out for each one the requirements applicable to the organisation. Several organisations engage in a verification process (self-assessment, peer review or independent certification, in particular by HQAI). Even without certification, the CHS is the common language used by donors and evaluators to judge quality and accountability.

What is examined, commitment by commitment, on the MEAL side

The most common mistakes

• Confusing quantity with use: dozens of indicators tracked, none of which has changed a decision. An auditor will always ask "give me an example of a decision taken on the basis of your data".
• MEAL serving only the donor: reports go to headquarters, but communities never see the results. Commitments 1 and 7 are not met.
• Accountability on paper only: "a hotline has been set up", without data on the number of calls, their breakdown by sex, response times or satisfaction with the response.
• Non-disaggregated data, which makes it impossible to see who is excluded.
• A MEAL plan written by a consultant and never used, which the team does not know.
• No monitoring of negative effects: tensions between displaced people and host families, risks on the way to and from distributions, pressure to get a place on the lists.

For an evaluation or a quality audit, prepare three documented examples: a decision taken on the basis of monitoring data, a change made following community feedback, and a lesson learned from a mistake. These three examples are worth more than all the tables.

11Adapting the system to the context

The same MEAL system does not work everywhere. Experienced professionals stand out through their ability to scale the system to the context, the time available and the risks.

Third-party monitoring

When access is impossible, many donors fund or require third-party monitoring. For it to be useful: define precisely what is being verified (existence and functionality of infrastructure, receipt of assistance by registered people, perceived quality), provide standardised tools, require verifiable evidence (time-stamped photos, interviews with a sample drawn by the NGO and not by the provider), and plan a process for handling findings with a response deadline. The main risk is transferring security risk to less protected enumerators: the safety of the provider's teams must be analysed in the same way as that of one's own staff.

12Interview questions and key references

Interview questions

1. "You arrive on a mission where MEAL amounts to an Excel table of outputs. What do you do in the first three months?"

A good answer follows a sequence: read the contractual commitments, listen to teams and partners, prioritise (reference sheets and data flow for the donor indicators), quickly deliver a first useful product (a one-page dashboard discussed in a meeting), then gradually build the rest. It avoids promising a complete system within a month and mentions accountability and data protection.

2. "What is the difference between monitoring and evaluation, and why should MEAL not report to the project manager?"

It distinguishes frequency, level of result and use, then explains the conflict of interest: the person judged on the results cannot be the one who certifies them. It proposes a realistic solution (line management by the MEAL coordinator, a strong functional link with programmes).

3. "How do you justify an 8% MEAL budget to a donor who considers it high?"

It breaks the budget down by activity, links each line to a commitment in the proposal (baseline for the outcome indicators, post-distribution monitoring for cash transfers, external evaluation), and states what would be lost if it were cut. It can suggest realistic savings (joint evaluation, phone surveys for some monitoring).

4. "A local authority asks for the full list of beneficiaries. What do you do?"

It hands over nothing on the spot, politely explains the data protection policy, escalates to country management, analyses the legal basis of the request and the risks to people, and, where possible, offers aggregated data. It cites the humanitarian principles and the guidance on data responsibility.

5. "Give an example of data changing a decision."

It describes a specific case with the data, the gap observed, the analysis of causes, the decision and the result of that decision. A general answer ("we use data to improve programmes") is weak.

Key references

• Core Humanitarian Standard on Quality and Accountability (CHS), 2024 edition: CHS Alliance, Sphere, Groupe URD.
• The Sphere Handbook: Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response, 2018 edition.
• Handbook on Data Protection in Humanitarian Action: ICRC and Brussels Privacy Hub.
• Operational Guidance on Data Responsibility in Humanitarian Action: IASC (2021, revised 2023).
• Minimum Standards for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action (CPMS), 2019 edition: Alliance for Child Protection in Humanitarian Action.
• ALNAP guides and resources on monitoring and evaluation of humanitarian action.
• Donor guidelines: ECHO Single Form and guidance, BHA application guidelines and indicator handbook, FCDO guidance on logframes and annual reviews.