3.6 Develop your Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning Approach Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL) considerations are integrated into a gender strategy from the beginning. While your MEAL Plan itself is a separate document, it needs to be developed alongside the Strategy and become operational immediately.5 This section of your Gender Strategy will indicate how you will check and report on progress and achievement and how you will maintain accountability to your stakeholders. Figure 9 is an excerpt from the South East Asian NHRI Forum’s (SEANF) Strategic Plan of 2022 – 2026 and is an excellent example of how these NHRIs planned to approach their MEAL activity. Figure 9: MEAL excerpt from the SEANF Strategic Plan (2022 – 2026) The success of this Strategic Plan is reliant on our ability to know how well we are achieving, or have achieved, our outcomes. The Outcomes Framework identifies our short, medium and longterm outcomes, the related high-level activities and indicators to measure progress. An Annual Plan will be developed for each year of the Strategic Plan, which will include the details of how activities will be monitored and evaluated. A Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) approach will guide our monitoring and evaluation process. MONITORING We will collect information that will tell us how well we are progressing towards achieving our outcomes. EVALUATION We will collect information at endpoints that will tell us how well we have achieved our outcomes. ACCOUNTABILITY We will listen to the views of our stakeholders, reflect these in our monitoring and evaluation findings and report back to stakeholders on the results. LEARNING We will reflect on our monitoring and evaluation findings, learn from them and apply what we have learned to future activities. To support your work, we have produced an example of a MEAL Plan in Tool 8, below. To repeat, this is not part of your Gender Strategy document itself. However, it is an important document and will be part of your plan to implement your Gender Strategy. 5 The APF has developed a comprehensive guide Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning Guide (2021) to support NHRIs understand how effectively activities are reaching, or have reached, planned outcomes. This is a downloadable resource and provides practical step-by-step guidelines, tools and resources, aspects of which may be useful for the development of the MEAL part of your Gender Strategy. Gender Strategy Toolkit 2026 55