It‘s All About MeE: Using Structured Experiential Learning ('e') to Crawl the Design Space

Organizations that fund development projects whether they be governments, multi-laterals, bilateral agencies, or NGOs have to make hard decisions about what to fund. In this decision there is an inherent tension between funding activities that have solid evidence about effectiveness and funding innovative activities that promise even greater effectiveness but are untested. Evidence based approaches that promote greater use of Rigorous Impact Evaluations (including randomized control trials) and evidence from those evaluations in policy and programming have added more rigor to the E (evaluation) in traditional M&E. Here we extend the basic idea of rigorous impact evaluation—the use of a valid counter-factual to make judgments about causality to evaluate project design and implementation. This adds a new learning component of experiential learning or a little e to the M&RIE so that instead of just M&E development projects are all about MeE. Structured experiential learning 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 project design and implementation. The key insight is that within- project variations can serve as their own counter-factual which dramatically reduces the incremental cost of evaluation and increases the usefulness of evaluation to implementing agencies. The right combination of MeE provides for rigorous learning while the providing needed space for innovation.