MEAL Demystified: What Every NGO Should Know

If you work in the development sector, you've almost certainly encountered the acronym MEAL. It appears in job titles, donor requirements, proposal templates, and countless training programmes. But ask ten practitioners what MEAL actually means in practice, and you'll likely get ten different answers.

That confusion isn't accidental. MEAL is both simpler than people make it sound and more nuanced than most introductions suggest. This guide aims to cut through the jargon and explain what each component actually involves—and why all four matter.

Breaking Down the Acronym

MEAL stands for Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning. Each component serves a distinct purpose, though in practice they overlap and reinforce each other.

[Illustration 1: The MEAL cycle]

Monitoring: The Foundation

Monitoring is the continuous, routine collection of data about your programme's activities and outputs. Think of it as keeping your finger on the pulse of implementation.

Good monitoring answers questions like: How many training sessions have we conducted? How many participants attended? What percentage were women? Are we on track to meet our targets? Where are we falling behind?

The key distinction is that monitoring focuses on what you're doing (activities and outputs), not what difference it makes (outcomes and impact). You might monitor that you've distributed 1,000 bed nets, but monitoring alone won't tell you whether malaria rates have declined.

Evaluation: The Deeper Look

While monitoring tracks implementation, evaluation assesses results. It asks whether your programme is actually creating the changes you intended—and often, whether those changes would have happened anyway.

Evaluations can be formative (conducted during implementation to improve the programme) or summative (conducted at the end to assess overall results). They can focus on process (how well the programme was implemented), outcome (what changes occurred), or impact (what changes can be attributed to the programme).

Impact evaluation, in particular, requires thinking carefully about the counterfactual: what would have happened without your intervention? This is where methodologies like randomised controlled trials, difference-in-differences, or regression discontinuity become relevant.

Accountability: The Two-Way Street

Accountability is perhaps the most misunderstood component of MEAL. It's not just about reporting to donors—though that matters. It's fundamentally about answerability to the communities you serve.

"Accountability means the people we're trying to help have genuine power to influence our work—not just receive it."

Meaningful accountability includes mechanisms for communities to provide feedback, lodge complaints, and participate in decisions that affect them. It requires transparency about what you're doing, why you're doing it, and what resources you're working with.

Too many organisations treat accountability as a compliance checkbox rather than a genuine commitment to power-sharing. The result is feedback mechanisms that exist on paper but don't actually influence programming.

[Illustration 2: The accountability relationship]

Learning: Closing the Loop

Learning is what transforms data into improvement. It's the "so what?" that connects all the monitoring data and evaluation findings to actual changes in how you work.

Organisations often collect extensive data and conduct elaborate evaluations, only to file the reports away and continue doing exactly what they were doing before. That's not learning—that's documentation.

Genuine learning requires dedicated time for reflection, psychological safety to admit what isn't working, and organisational systems that actually incorporate insights into decision-making. It means treating failure as information rather than something to hide.

Why All Four Matter

Some organisations do excellent monitoring but never step back to evaluate whether their activities create real change. Others conduct rigorous evaluations but don't have the routine data to understand implementation. Many tick the accountability boxes without genuinely empowering communities. And most struggle to convert any of it into systematic learning.

MEAL only works as an integrated system. Monitoring feeds evaluation by providing the routine data that evaluations build upon. Evaluation informs accountability by giving communities and other stakeholders substantive information about results. Accountability enriches learning by surfacing perspectives that internal analysis might miss. And learning closes the loop by improving all three.

Getting Started

If your organisation is just beginning to build MEAL capacity, start with the basics: What questions do you actually need to answer? What decisions will you make differently with better evidence? Who are you accountable to, and what do they need to know?

Don't try to build a perfect system from scratch. Start simple, learn what works in your context, and iterate. The goal isn't a sophisticated MEAL framework that looks good on paper—it's a practical approach that actually helps you do better work.

ImpactMojo's MEAL courses and labs are designed to help you build these skills step by step, with examples drawn from the South Asian development context. Because every practitioner deserves access to the fundamentals.