Building a Community of Practice around Evidence Generation at the Millennium Challenge Corporation

Samuel Ginty
Jenny Heintz
28 October 2024
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Building a Community of Practice around Evidence Generation at the Millennium Challenge Corporation
The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is a U.S. agency that partners with countries to reduce poverty through evidence-based, sustainable economic growth initiatives. In this blog piece, we learn how MCC builds a community of practice around evidence generation.

Samuel Ginty is the Senior Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) Officer at the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). Jenny Heintz is the M&E Director of MCC.

 

A core strength of the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s (MCC) model is the diverse range of perspectives and skill sets that our global network of counterparts offers. This is why MCC prioritizes regularly organizing Colleges which bring together counterparts from our partner countries and serve as a forum to share ideas and innovations. 

In September 2024, 48 monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and economic professionals from 19 countries gathered in MCC's headquarters office in Washington, DC. MCC’s 2024 M&E and Economic Analysis gathering, dubbed the 2024 College, gave M&E and economic counterparts a forum to discuss implementing evaluations, cost-benefit analysis, data quality reviews, and practically everything in between.  

Building a Community of Practice around Evidence Generation at the Millennium Challenge Corporation

The 2024 College was “a great opportunity for exchange between M&E specialists,” said Marème Ndoye, Director of Monitoring, Evaluation, and Economic Analysis at Millennium Challenge Account Senegal II (MCA - Senegal II), providing space to discuss “challenges encountered, best practices, and lessons learned from other MCC investments.”

Participants represented MCC grant programs in design and implementation phases, as well as from closed grant programs. Those who have worked on MCC’s programs longer were able to share insights with participants who were just starting with their M&E plans.

Marème Ndoye, Director of Monitoring, Evaluation & Economic Analysis at MCA Senegal II
Marème Ndoye, Director of Monitoring, Evaluation and Economic Analysis at MCA-Senegal II, with Senegalese colleagues

The five-day conference covered both the fundamentals of M&E and economic work, in addition to highlighting innovative practices and ideas across different programs. Roberto Lopez, former M&E Director for the El Salvador Investment Compact, highlighted the data quality review his team conducted of the Ministry of Education’s data and how MCC’s investment in a new education Management Information System (MIS) helped drastically improve the quality and utility of that data. Ismahel Barry, M&E Director for the Cote D’Ivoire Compact, shared his experience revising the country M&E Plan, which took the team four years due to challenges in project implementation.  

There was no shortage of interesting innovative practices on display. Of note, Sugih Hartono demonstrated how MCA Indonesia II integrates the project logic and associated indicator tracking into project work planning, and Ibrahmia Ba explained how MCA Senegal II’s Data Validation Committees convene stakeholders to discuss data quality concerns.  

In addition, participants had the opportunity to hear from Douglas Glandon of the Global Evaluation Initiative (GEI), who shared how they could connect with GEI through the CLEAR networks in their region to partner on M&E system strengthening and capacity building. GEI and MCC share values of evidence-based policy making and country ownership.  This was hopefully the start of several strong opportunities for collaboration between MCC’s M&E professional network and the CLEAR regional offices.  

“Monitoring and Evaluation is a profession whose expertise is acquired through the accumulation of experience over time,” said Cossi Houeninvo, M&E and Economic Director of the now concluded Benin II compact, and through programs like this College, “MCC and partner countries are building an important internal skills ecosystem.” 

The MCC team hopes to build on the momentum this event created. Important connections were made between participants that will enable them to continue discussions, and MCC will facilitate semi-annual meetings to showcase innovative practices. This will be the first time MCC’s partners have ongoing forums to share ideas and experiences among themselves, in addition to the bilateral collaboration that currently exists between partner country M&E staff and MCC M&E staff. 

Key Takeaways 

Successes and lessons learned for future conferences include: 

  • Prioritize building connections to establish a continuing community of practice.
  • Highlight innovations to inspire others.
  • Celebrate successes.
  • Maximize small group discussions so everyone can participate.
  • Focus on next steps to apply lessons learned.