Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA): Episode 5, Part 2 Evaluation experts and MEDA discuss flaws in their PMF and provide solutions.
In this episode 5, Part 2, Dr. Wand discusses with evaluation expert Benjamin Serebour and MEDA representative Yasir Dildar the Mennonite Economic Development Associates www.meda.org Performance Measurement Framework (PMF) for a $19,040,307 Million project in Africa, Americas, and Asia entitled A New Partnership for Sustainable Impact Investing in Frontier Markets. You can learn more about this project at https://w05.international.gc.ca/projectbrowser-banqueprojets/project-projet/details/D000120001. This discussion focuses the flaws with the PMF and provides solutions to how the PMF can be improved. In brief, those solutions include: Stop using self-reporting/Most Significant Change from individuals trained/mentored by MEDA as a method to claim that these individuals have experienced increased levels of skill/knowledge/technical ability. Replace this with objective, technical measures of technical ability. If this is too expensive, take a sample. If these individuals and organizations refuse this, do not provide the training and mentoring. You have that leverage. For organizations or 'entities' that MEDA claims to be increasing their standards of reporting on gender and environmental issues due to their training/mentoring, replace the number reporting on these standards with the percentage achieving this minimum standard using your technical audits and put this in your PMF. MEDA cannot find comparison groups that wish to participate in being measured on their project outcomes. Fair enough. Take your treatment group and use half of them as your comparison group and deliver your training/mentoring to that group later. See Chapter 5 Quasi-Experimentation Handbook of Practical Program Evaluation Second Edition ISBN 0-7879-6713-0 for other options without using comparison groups. Include country level reporting in your PMF as there are bound to be variations in performance between countries.