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Building a culture of learning and collaboration takes time. It involves encouraging open dialogue and knowledge sharing among a diversity of voices, from programme staff and volunteers to external stakeholders, ensuring that every voice is heard and valued. Feedback and learning should be actively sought through regular sessions where people can discuss successes, challenges and lessons learned in a safe, supportive environment. Ideally, these lessons should be documented and shared more widely so that others can learn. The Spotlight Initiative aimed to build a culture of learning, both…

People and organisations learn in different ways, and it is important to share learning in ways that are accessible and tailored to target audiences, particularly practitioners and policymakers working to address violence. Various methods can be used to share findings, including developing learning briefs and video explainers, in-person group meetings, communities of practice (e.g. via Spotlight Initiative’s SHINE hub), dialogues, learning circles and spaces for reflective practice.

Determining the most suitable activities to capture learning in VAWG programmes requires careful consideration of time, resources, and the types of data needed. Ensure the chosen methods - whether interviews, surveys, observational studies, communities of practice, or another approach - fit the programme timelines and budget constraints. The following diagram and table helps to understand the overlaps and different methods used for M&E and learning.

M&E
M&E + Learning
Learning

Day-to-day monitoring for project management
Development of stories exclusively for marketing…

Actively involving a diverse group of stakeholders can help create a more impactful learning agenda. Collaboration with others brings unique expertise and perspectives, while also increasing buy-in and making it more likely that stakeholders will support and share key learnings. It also avoids duplication of efforts on topics already explored. Engage stakeholders early on to gain insights into the feasibility, potential costs and learning needs, as well as understanding how best to increase the uptake of learning. Practitioners, women’s rights organisations, local leaders and civil society…

Learning questions should aim to understand the nuances of how and why changes occurred, explore unintended effects, and understand the implications for future policy and programming. When developing learning questions for a VAWG programme, it can be useful to:

Centre women and girls so that the learning questions give voice to their experiences and needs
Use the Theory of Change to identify questions
Embed learning questions in various activities from results frameworks, reporting, meetings, evaluations and accompanying research questions
Co-design and validate learning questions…

Learning should be considered at the outset while developing the M&E framework to ensure that the programme focuses on collecting data and reporting information that can be used in realtime to adapt the programme to changing circumstances and can also support longer-term and wider learning beyond the programme.

It is helpful to develop a learning strategy to explain how, when and where M&E systems can contribute to learning at different levels (local, country, regional and global) and decide how the learning agenda will feed into existing M&E processes such as the development of research…

Monitoring and learning plans should consider the following key components and outline details on:

Resources: budget, time and trained staff or consultant availability to conduct the activities and implement the plan. This includes funding, technical capacity, equipment, etc.
Capacity: whether the programme has the internal capacity and processes to carry out the proposed monitoring and learning activities, including data analysis, or if external expertise is required and defining their roles and responsibilities for collecting and managing data. Consider capabilities, such as whether…

While developing a monitoring plan for a VAWG programme, it is important to also integrate a learning plan (and implement a knowledge management strategy) so that programme teams can understand what is working and what is not, engage in ongoing learning and reflection and make any necessary programme adjustments in real-time. Ideally, the learning plan will map out the learning questions or objectives, channels, formats, frequency, timeframes and resources to analyse monitoring data, to make programme adjustments and to produce and disseminate the knowledge products. 

It is important to set…

Once the indicators to be tracked through regular monitoring have been agreed upon, you need to select the data collection method(s) for each indicator. For primary data collection, consider the unit of analysis (individuals, families, communities, etc.) and how the data will be disaggregated (by gender, age, ethnic groups, locations, etc.). Tools can include pre- and post-test questionnaires, monitoring checklists, participant feedback forms, focus group discussions, key informant interviews, field monitoring visits, monitoring reports, training facilitator surveys, stories etc. These should…

Good indicators are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound (SMART). Each indicator needs a clear definition that describes how it will be monitored in a consistent way and the type of data to be collected (qualitative or quantitative) and how frequently so that results can be compared. Indicators are only as good as the quality of the data used to measure them, so it’s important to consider the context and culture of interventions when designing them. If it’s not feasible to collect data for an indicator, or the data that can be collected are not meaningful, the indicator…