LEARNING PARTNERSHIP
Institute for Human Rights
and Business / Gulf Sustain
A learning partnership for programme complexity
Client: Institute for Human Rights and Business (IHRB) / Gulf Sustain
Service: MEL strategy and learning partnership
Year: 2024 - present
How can MEL systems be easy to engage with and maintain, but still genuinely useful, in a complex programme and operating environment?
This was the crux of our work with IHRB’s Gulf Sustain programme, a regional initiative launched in 2022 to support workers’ rights in the green transition across the Gulf region. The programme was operating in a tricky environment: change was likely to be slow, transparency could be limited, key stakeholders were often hard to access, and the team needed a MEL approach that was useful in practice (and not just robust on paper).
Designing a tailored MEL strategy and framework
Our first aim was to build an evaluation and learning strategy that proportionate to the programme scale, practical, and sensitive to the realities of the work.
Our approach combined theory of change thinking, contribution analysis, mixed methods, and space for identifying unexpected outcomes. We worked with the team to develop tools and processes that could support accountability as well as adaptive management.
“There is no one way to evaluate a programme. For a project like this, it was very important to tailor the approach to the complexity of the region and the programme, whilst also ensuring enough rigour and process".
– Patrick Regan, RES Director
Moving into a learning partnership
The work went beyond a simple framework design. A major part of the collaboration was ongoing support to implement the framework and adapt to change, helping the team use the system and making sense of what they were seeing, so they could turn emerging insight into practical decisions.
Learning partnerships don’t always need to be a huge investment, and evaluation can look different than formal end-of-project assessments. Sometimes what is most valuable is a lighter-touch relationship that creates regular opportunities to step back, ask strategic questions of learning data, and reflect on what could happen next.
Why this kind of support added value
For a programme like Gulf Sustain, this kind of ongoing reflection was particularly important. The team was working across different country contexts, engaging governments, businesses, fellows, academics, and civil society, while at the same time trying to understand where the programme was contributing to change in policy, practice, accountability, and organisational learning.
Through regular learning touch points, and ongoing support with reporting and analysis, the work has helped Gulf Sustain build learning into the rhythm of the programme and embed evaluation into delivery.