Mentorship Programme Equips Development Practitioners for Lasting Change

Since ten international development professionals completed PEP's 2025 Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Mentorship Program in December, the results have been visible well beyond the virtual sessions. 

Participants restructured MEL frameworks for active projects, established beneficiary databases to track individuals over time, and made the case to their own leadership for more rigorous impact evaluations. 

Provided as part the Learning and Knowledge Management Project (LKMP), supported by Global Affairs Canada, PEP's investment in sustained, practical MEL capacity is strengthening how organisations approach learning and evidence.

Participants described changes that extended beyond their own roles into their organisations' systems and practices. One mentee summarised the breadth of that shift:

"I have applied several MEL concepts and practices that I became aware of through the mentorship to my day-to-day work. To name a few, I have incorporated aspects of Outcome Harvesting and Most Significant Change evaluation approaches … I have been convinced of the value of utilising gender-transformative MEL practices, even in the context of projects that are not explicitly characterised as such, by utilising strategies such as participatory MEL and the systematic documentation of unintended or unexpected outcomes."

Another described structural changes within their organisation:

"I have advocated to the leadership of my organisation to set aside funds for conducting rigorous, quasi-experimental impact evaluations as part of the project cycle, championing the importance of conducting such evaluations for generating actionable evidence of the value of our work." 

Others applied programme insights to train local partners in policy advocacy messaging, while another redesigned a newly approved project's MEL plan to enable individual-level tracking across the full project cycle and beyond.

This breadth of application reflects a deliberate design choice by PEP. The mentorship programme was built as a complement to PEP's MEL training activities, giving implementers from Canadian small and medium organisations (SMOs) and their local partners a space to deepen and apply prior learning within the context of their active projects.

The programme ran from April to December 2025, bringing together mid- and senior-level professionals from organisations operating in Uganda, Kenya, Nicaragua, Malawi, Cameroon, and beyond. 

Designed and delivered by PEP staff, Ana Badillo (Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Specialist), Jorge Dávalos (Director of Research), and Marjorie Alain (Director, Engagement and Impact), PEP built the curriculum around participants' specific and identified learning needs. 

The programme combined monthly online sessions with in-person workshops at PEP's Annual Conference in Nairobi. Seventy percent of participants were women, significantly surpassing the programme's 50% gender target.

All ten participants completed the programme, and when surveyed, every respondent reported being very satisfied and that they would recommend it to their peers. 

Looking ahead, PEP will convene a follow-up check-in with the 2025 cohort later this year to track longer-term uptake and capture evidence of continued application. Lessons from that process will feed directly into the design of the next mentorship cohort and understanding how capacity-building translates into stronger development outcomes.