Adaptive Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning for Public Health: Embracing complexity to make measurements matter

The complexities of public health practice requires innovative and agile ways to monitor, evaluate, and maximize the impact of complex interventions in dynamic contexts and conditions of uncertainty. Recent pandemics and intersecting economic, social, and environmental crises have only ramped up this urgency to "Adapt or fail". Adaptive approaches to monitoring, evaluation, and learning (Adaptive MEL) address these needs by using emerging insights to enable timely course corrections and improvements during project implementation. However, practical guidance on how to design and implement Adaptive MEL in public health programming remains slim.

This three-day course fills this gap. It is not intended as a primer on a specific method or set of methods. Rather, this course offers a holistic overview of the practice of Adaptive MEL. Participants will be introduced to fundamental design principles and characteristics that distinguish Adaptive MEL from conventional results measurement. Participants will become familiar with complex systems-aware frameworks, methods, and participatory processes for supporting real-time evidence generation and adaptive learning. Through case examples from contributors and group discussions, participants will also gain insights into practical aspects of implementation effectiveness, including strengths, limitations, and failure points of different designs. Most issues and approaches discussed are relevant to high, middle, and low-resources settings.

This course is relevant for a diverse audience of public health practitioners, researchers, and decision makers who are eager to think “outside the box” about how to generate and use program results for adaptive action in their projects and work environments. To foster collaborative learning over the three days, participants will be encouraged to share their own knowledge and experience through discussion, group exercises, and final group presentations.

By the end of the course participants will be able to:

• Explain key design principles, rationale, and characteristics of adaptive MEL, and what distinguishes them from conventional evaluative research;
• Describe relevant inquiry frameworks, methods, and processes for generating evidence in real-time;
• Identify tools and techniques to support timely knowledge sharing and adaptive decision making, as well as their limitations;
• Assess real-world conditions for implementing adaptive MEL, including important capacities, enabler, and barriers around effective implementation;
• Draw on course learning to conceptualize and pitch a mock plan for using adaptive MEL in a program setting (done in small group).

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• Some professional or academic experience with public health programs;
• Basic knowledge of or practical experience with Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) would be beneficial, but is not mandatory.

• Facilitator lectures;
• Case study presentations and Q&A with contributors;
• Peer exchange and brief exercises;
• Group presentation.
  
  

• Participants must attend at least 80% of the course;
• Active engagement in group exercises and discussions;
• Contribution to group presentation.

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At least one facilitator will be on-site in Lugano, and some may join online. Participants are welcomed to join either on-site in Lugano, or online. In case of a change of regional policies (e.g., Covid) or personal reasons, the course could change to online.