In the first weeks and months after Covid-19 hit, the author of this article, Tiina Pasanen, attended and spoke at several online workshops and webinars about on how to do monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) and research during the crisis.
These sessions were all very helpful, with experienced experts discussing valid issues like doing data collection remotely, the limits and strengths of phone and SMS surveys, specific ethical considerations, whether smaller sample sizes and less stratification would be fine and so on.
This focus was of course natural. In-person data collection was one thing that obviously had to change given the social distancing.
But MEL goes – or at least should go – beyond data collection, and these other elements are still affected by the crisis too. What the author saw were two persistent MEL challenges becoming amplified.