Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning | A Guide for NHRIs in the Asia Pacific Introduction for users About this guide Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning: A Guide for NHRIs (the Guide) is a downloadable resource that provides practical step-by-step guidelines, tools and resources for your National Human Rights Institution (NHRI) to integrate monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning (MEAL) into its work. It is essential for the credibility of your NHRI that it reports, with confidence and authority, on the positive impacts it has on human rights in your country. Your NHRI can do this by embedding a culture of monitoring and evaluation through its staff, processes and activities. Your NHRI will learn whether, and how well, it is impacting on human rights by reflecting on the information that is gathered during the monitoring and evaluation process. This information will help you understand how your NHRI can better achieve its outcomes. The Guide has been produced to be used alongside the APF Resource, Guide to Strategic Planning1. While it is intended for a whole-of-NHRI level, it can also be used at a department, programme or project level. The Guide will help you to develop a MEAL Framework and a MEAL Plan so you can: • monitor and evaluate your activities, • be accountable to your stakeholders, • learn from the results of the monitoring and evaluation activities. In preparing this Guide, we recognise that many NHRIs already have effective monitoring and evaluation systems in place. The Guide is not intended to replace the existing systems or frameworks that are already working well for your NHRI. Rather, we hope it offers some direction to those NHRIs who do not have a culture of MEAL, or those who want to strengthen their MEAL activity. We look forward to building and strengthening the Guide with case studies, tools and processes from around the region. Who is this guide for? This Guide is suitable for use across all levels of the NHRI. While leaders of NHRIs, (Ombudspeople, Commissioners, Senior Executive Officers, and Senior Managers) will be responsible for driving a MEAL culture in your NHRI, everyone in the organisation is responsible for implementing MEAL. Senior Leaders of the NHRI At a strategic level, a MEAL Framework outlines how you will monitor and evaluate your NHRI’s strategic priorities (which are included in your Strategic Plan). Your NHRI will review and refresh its strategic plan every 3 – 5 years.2 By gathering data—including what was learned from monitoring and evaluating the outcomes of the previous strategic plan—as well as key stakeholder engagement, your NHRI will identify its strategic priorities and the outcomes it wants to achieve over the next period. This is the Strategic Plan. Your NHRI will also need to decide how to monitor and evaluate progress toward those outcomes. This is your MEAL Framework. The MEAL Framework takes the outcomes identified in the Strategic Plan and develops the high-level inputs, activities, outputs, indicators, baselines, and targets (Section 2). 6