MEAL Framework Development, Data Collection and Analysis, Performance Monitoring, Impact Evaluation, Risk Management, Reporting and Documentation, Team Leadership, Capacity Strengthening, Budgeting and tracking, Business Development, Learning strategies, Context Analysis, Gender Mainstreaming, Stakeholder Mapping Engagement and Management, and Organization Capacity Development. I have worked across various sectors such as education, humanitarian aid, nutrition promotion, climate, livelihoods, diversity and inclusive development, health, youth, and gender-transformative initiatives. Over 14 years of hands-on experience
Posted on 29/04/2026
Reflections from my experience in complex adaptation contexts:
Drawing from my work on community‑ and nature‑based adaptation initiatives in Southern Africa and beyond, I believe evaluators sometimes overstate the absence of foresight in evaluation. The challenge is rarely the lack of tools, but rather timing, depth, and intent. Climate disruption, ecosystem degradation, shifting geopolitical conditions, and cascading crises are no longer background noise; they actively shape development pathways and community decisions in real time. Yet foresight is often introduced late in the evaluation cycle, applied superficially, or treated as a technical add‑on rather than a strategic lens. When evaluation is not explicitly designed to engage with uncertainty, power dynamics, and interacting risks from the outset, it struggles to reflect the true complexity of adaptation systems.
In practice, this becomes clear when evaluating climate and nature‑based adaptation interventions. An evaluation that only looks backwards is like navigating by a map of where you’ve been, in terrain that is constantly reshaping itself. Integrating foresight means adapting tools we already know how to use, such as scenario planning, participatory approaches, and forward‑looking Theories of Change, to ask not only what has worked, but what may work under different future conditions. Embedding adaptive management, with regular feedback loops and real‑time data, allows evaluations to remain relevant as contexts shift. Most critically, community perspectives, through co‑evaluation, anchor foresight in lived realities, surfacing local knowledge about risks, trade‑offs, and opportunities. When intent is truly future‑informed, evaluation moves beyond the rear‑view mirror to act as a compass and horizon scanner, helping decision‑makers identify adaptation pathways that are resilient to cascading shocks and ultimately more just, sustainable, and humane.
Zimbabwe
Wilbert Marimira
MEAL Specialist
CARE International
Posted on 13/10/2026
Thank you for articulating this crucial reality so clearly!
Your point on how funding shocks quietly shift the balance from transformative learning to rigid, compliance-heavy accountability hits at the very core of our sector's challenge. Drawing from my work leading MEAL systems across Education, Humanitarian Response, Social Protection, Climate Resilience, and Livelihoods in Southern Africa & beyond, I resonate deeply with your conclusion, in lean times, evidence doesn't become less valuable, it becomes our primary risk insurance against squandering scarce resources.
The path forward isn't choosing between compliance and learning, but embedding Participatory Monitoring, Evaluation, Reporting, and Learning (PMERL) directly into routine operations. True sustainability and accountability happen when we put community voices at the forefront and shift their voices, influence, and decision-making closer to the people who understand their realities, engaging local leaders, school heads, and target populations from project design and baseline planning right through to closeout. When stand-alone evaluation budgets shrink, donors and implementers must invest in localized, high-trust mechanisms like Community-Led Monitoring (CLM), Participatory Scorecards, and human-in-the-loop AI evidence synthesis. By transforming routine community feedback into continuous reflection spaces, we ensure that every dollar spent is not only accounted for, but actively driving community-owned impact.
Zimbabwe
Wilbert Marimira
MEAL Specialist
CARE International
Posted on 13/10/2026
Thank you for sharing these crucial insights!
Your blog post highlights a vital turning point for our field: when financial pressure mounts, our greatest asset isn’t just working faster, but thinking and synthesizing smarter. Embracing AI as an analytical partner is like having a tireless research assistant, one that can sift through mountains of past reports in seconds, but still relies entirely on human wisdom, field empathy, and contextual judgment to make sense of the big picture. You identified that responsible AI adoption isn't about replacing the evaluator’s voice or cutting corners on quality; it’s about freeing our time and mental energy from repetitive data sorting so we can engage more deeply in what truly matters: listening to communities, interpreting nuance, and exercising professional oversight.
To add another layer to this momentum, leveraging AI to synthesize existing evidence offers an unprecedented opportunity to democratise localised learning while firmly maintaining a Human-in-the-Loop approach. AI can identify patterns, but it cannot feel field realities or understand cultural nuances; human judgment remains the irreplaceable bridge between raw data outputs and ethical, context-driven decision-making. In many field contexts, years of rich community feedback and local monitoring reports remain trapped in buried PDFs because small MEAL teams lack the hours to analyze them manually. By applying human-guided AI workflows to harvest and map these qualitative insights, with rigorous human validation at every step, we can prevent evaluation fatigue in vulnerable communities, honor past local contributions, and safeguard evaluation rigour when resources are tightest.
Zimbabwe
Wilbert Marimira
MEAL Specialist
CARE International
Posted on 13/10/2026
Thank you, Janet, for sharing such a critical and timely piece!
Cutting M&E during a funding crisis to save money is like throwing the ship’s radar overboard during a severe storm to lighten the load. You might keep afloat a few miles further today, but you guarantee steering straight into the rocks tomorrow.
I completely agree with your analysis, dropping M&E requirements when aid contracts creates a dangerous false economy. When evidence systems are dismantled, we don't just lose project indicators; we lose years of invested local capacity, community trust networks, and contextual intelligence. Without data, we are left counting immediate inputs while remaining blind to long-term impact, practically guaranteeing that costly implementation mistakes will be repeated in future cycles.
To break this cycle, we must advocate for radical prioritization rather than total abandonment. Donors must recognize that ring-fencing even 2% to 3% of reduced grant budgets for M&E is not administrative bloat, it is essential risk insurance to ensure scarce funds are not squandered. At the same time, implementers can transition to lean, localized mechanisms, such as Community-Led Monitoring, routine administrative data synthesis, and a strict core set of non-negotiable indicators. As you powerfully stated, limited funds make evidence more important, not less; we cannot afford to navigate these lean times completely blind.
Zimbabwe
Wilbert Marimira
MEAL Specialist
CARE International
Posted on 13/10/2026
Adapting, Navigating, and Owning - Safeguarding Evaluation Integrity, Accountability, and Learning in Lean Times
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — African Proverb
In times of financial crisis, shrinking aid budgets and sudden donor cuts often tempt organizations to "go fast and alone" relying on top-down, rapid internal assessments and cutting local participation to save time and money. However, if evaluation is to remain relevant, ethical, and sustainable amid growing funding constraints, we must choose to "go far together." Reduced resources do not have to mean compromised quality or silenced local voices; rather, they present a vital opportunity to strip away bloated, extractive evaluation practices and return to what truly matters: actionable learning, technical integrity, and genuine, community-led accountability.
Building directly on this principle, operational experience across Southern Africa, specifically in the, Education, Social Protection, Climate Resilience, and Livelihoods sectors, teaches a clear lesson: funding shocks do not have to destroy evaluation quality, but they do demand that we adapt. Managing emergency MEAL systems in drought-prone districts such as Gokwe North, Mutare Rural, Bikita, and Chiredzi showed how field realities, practical missteps, and localised adaptations serve as our best teachers for protecting evaluation integrity under pressure.
I also noted that in resource-constrained settings, traditional, expensive evaluation models, such as heavy, stand-alone quantitative surveys at the end of every project cycle, are financially unsustainable. To maintain evidence, use without compromising technical rigor, here are some key practical experiences we employed:
Also, demonstrating true professional integrity means owning operational missteps, reflecting on the friction between ideal textbook methodologies and field realities, and adapting to serve communities better. Here are two practical mistakes from my journey in Zimbabwe and beyond, the core lessons they taught me:
Mistake 1: "Data Hoarding" in Emergency Livelihoods & Food Security
The Experience: During an emergency response project in drought-affected wards, I was determined to capture everything. I designed a statistically exhaustive sampling frame with a 45-page questionnaire covering detailed household demographics, livelihood assets, and granular food consumption scores across multiple districts. The data collection somewhat drained our transport budget, exhausted our small field team, and generated a massive backlog of raw data. The Lesson: Collect only what you will use. Integrity is not about generating the largest dataset; it is about delivering timely, actionable evidence when decision-makers and communities actually need it. High-pressure evaluation requires radical prioritization around "Must-Know" vs. "Nice-to-Know" metrics. Using targeted cluster sampling, lean digital survey platforms (such as KoBoToolbox or ODK), and concise indicators protects both project resources and community time.
The Experience: Faced with a sudden 15% budget cut midway through a Longitudinal education and social protection project, our team worked to absorb costs by trimming internal staffing without compromising quality, travel stipends, and administrative overhead. However, seeking further savings to preserve the core quantitative survey for the donor, we initially canceled formal, hotel-based validation workshops. Recognizing that target communities, school heads, and local leaders were at risk of being left in the dark, we quickly pivoted to ensure local stakeholders remained our top priority.
The Human Reality: In earlier project phases, failing to return findings promptly had led community leaders to express deep frustration at feeling treated as mere data sources rather than equal partners. Learning from that initial friction, we realised that maintaining trust/accountability required putting local leaders, school heads, and community members first, even when formal budgets were depleted.
The Lesson: Accountability is not an optional overhead line to be trimmed; it is the core of project ethics. When funding is tight, prioritizing communities, school heads, and local leaders means localising accountability rather than abandoning it. Instead of expensive hotel venues, hosting low-cost ward dialogues under a tree using indigenous language summaries ensured that local stakeholders were prioritized as true co-owners of evaluation findings without financial strain.
Practical Questions & Adaptive Approaches for Lean Evaluation
To maintain evaluation usefulness, rigor, and ethical standards when budgets are tight, grounding evaluation design in strategic questions and adaptive methods is essential:
Core Guiding Questions to Ask Early:
Here are some practical approaches that worked for us:
Funding constraints force us to strip away unnecessary complexity and focus on what truly matters: actionable learning, community agency, and genuine accountability. When we ground our evaluation approaches in local realities, whether in Southern Africa or elsewhere across the globe, we ensure that evidence remains a vital tool for positive change, regardless of budget size.
I look forward to hearing how other colleagues across the Eval4Earth community are adapting their systems to stay effective and resilient!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/wilbert-marimira-b7321b80