MEAL and Results Based Management for Alternative Care, Egypt

Sanad for Alternative Parental Care, which developed Egypt's national quality standards for alternative care, commissioned Common Ground Solutions to strengthen its monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning (MEAL) system and embed results based management across its programmes.

The terms of reference set out eight areas of work and twelve deliverables, from a diagnostic of current practice and an organization wide results architecture to data governance, accountability and feedback, learning, capacity building and handover. One results framework has to hold direct services, standards adoption by care institutions, training and certification, and policy influence.

CGS works in eight phases over six months. The diagnostic combines a documentary review, a MEAL maturity assessment across twelve domains, key informant consultations across all functions, and the tracing of three to five reported indicators from first record to final report, with a verification spot check against source records.

Safeguarding is treated as a design constraint, since the data concerns children, caregivers and youth leaving care. Eight training modules in Arabic, with competency assessment before and after each module and regular coaching clinics, run alongside the design work, and the instruments are piloted on two to three live programmes before handover.

CGS delivers an inception note, a diagnostic report with a prioritized roadmap, a theory of change and results framework with indicator reference sheets, MEAL procedures and instruments, data quality and reporting tools, a feedback mechanism, a learning agenda, a bilingual guidance and standard operating procedure package, an implementation roadmap and a final report.