Since the beginning of the outbreak, the Integrity-led Global MEL Partnership, has supported the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF) through a COVID-19 Peer Exchange. The Exchange has created a space to share experience and know-how on conducting Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) of programming during the pandemic.

COVID-19 is expected to have a lasting, negative effect on countries already impacted by violent conflict and instability. Integrity’s collaborative MEL approach is critical to adapt CSSF programming to its challenges with the aim of providing rapid responses to support peacebuilding and stability.
Adaptive MEL will be key to ensuring effective delivery during the pandemic. Collaboration between MEL Advisers also helps facilitate knowledge exchange on how CSSF programmes are pivoting in response. As part of the initiative, MEL Advisers discuss lessons learnt at the regional and country level on a weekly basis, and have developed a dialogue on a range of programme-related, practical topics.

This initiative is part of a broader MEL package. In 2019 the CSSF contracted Integrity to lead the Global MEL Partnership and support the development of a more agile and sustainable MEL ‘ecosystem’ and enable its application in decision-making. The ongoing engagement on the COVID-19 response will support the Global MEL Partnership to achieve its wider scope of work, whilst providing support to address the impacts of the coronavirus at the programme level.

As the pandemic spreads, it continues to impact on the everyday life of communities around the world. It exposes governments to rapidly evolving challenges that require adaptive, innovative, and dynamic responses. Sharing best practices and successful measures to reduce infection rates across governments helps to get the balance right between containing the disease, reducing the overburden of the crisis on healthcare and other social systems and mitigating the negative social and economic impacts of the measures themselves. This is especially so in fragile contexts where governance structures and service delivery are nascent or challenged by conflict and instability.

CSSF programmes need to learn and adapt to find ways to respond to COVID-19. CSSF funded programmes were critically affected by the pandemic and now require a rapid prioritization of CSSF’s response strategies, including adaptive conflict resolution and prevention to respond to primary and secondary effects of COVID-19. The situation also provides the opportunity to foster dynamic approaches and collaboration between programme portfolios to tackle common issues.
The Global MEL Partnership’s objective is to develop the systems and capabilities necessary for enabling the generation and synthesis of results and evidence across the CSSF, as well as rigorously embedding evidence generation and dissemination, and lesson learning into programme decision and design. In the context of the pandemic, the Global MEL Partnership is supporting the CSSF in building and managing MEL systems around COVID-19 with a series of interventions addressing primary and secondary effects of the crisis.