🌟 Editor's Note
Hello again from Warsaw! We’re putting the final touches on our list of M&E masters-level programs, and are also planning out the development of our job board. Hardest thing there will be ensuring that it remains up-to-date and constantly refreshing, but nothing some Claude-assisted coding can’t do!
✂ Living Goods cuts reporting time from 2 weeks to 24 hours
What's new: IDinsight helped Living Goods transform their monthly reporting from a gruelling two-week manual process into an automated system that delivers fresh insights daily.
Why it matters: If your team spends weeks each month wrestling with data instead of acting on insights, you're not alone. This case study shows exactly how one organisation broke free from "report season" hell.
The problem: Living Goods' analytics teams across Kenya, Uganda and Burkina Faso were drowning in manual data processing. Nearly half their month disappeared into report preparation, leaving little time for the analysis that actually improves community health programmes.
How they fixed it: Three strategic moves transformed everything:
Breaking down data silos by creating a centralised warehouse with standardised metrics across countries. No more comparing apples to oranges.
Automating the pipeline using modern tools like dbt instead of hundreds of manual steps. The system now runs overnight with built-in quality checks.
Democratising access through interactive dashboards and automated email reports. Stakeholders get timely insights instead of waiting weeks for static PDFs.
The results: Teams now spend 75% less time on data processing and deliver insights 10x faster. More importantly, programme staff can spot problems and adjust course in real-time rather than discovering issues weeks later.
Between the lines: The biggest challenge wasn't technical—it was getting teams across different countries to agree on what metrics actually mean. Success came from focusing on end users (the community health workers) rather than getting lost in technical specifications.
What you can steal: Start with your biggest reporting bottleneck. Map out every manual step, then ask which ones a computer could handle overnight. The goal isn't perfect data—it's actionable insights delivered when decisions need to be made. Your reporting process should amplify your impact, not consume it. If you recognise yourself in Living Goods' "before" story, their roadmap offers a proven way forward.
💼 Jobs & Opportunities
Jobs & Opportunities board coming soon!
3 x Senior Research Fellows
UK FCDO
FCDO’s Research Commissioning Centre commissions and manages research to enhance development and foreign policy impact. It addressesing challenges associated with research bureaucracy by providing a streamlined process for commissioning and delivering FCDO-funded research. These placements are for roles under the themes of Clean Energy and Innovation, Migration, and Humanitarian.
Deadline: 10 September 2025
Conference Programme Coordinator
European Evaluation Society
EES is seeking a Conference Programme Coordinator for their flagship event — EES2026 — taking place in Lille, France on 26-30 October 2026. They seek someone well-versed in current evaluation trends to manage peer reviewers and shape a coherent programme, with event coordination experience a plus.
Deadline: 25 September 2025
🎯 Targeting Subsidies: Three Methods, Different Results
What's new: IDinsight and iDE compared three approaches for identifying poor households eligible for sanitation subsidies in rural Ethiopia, revealing significant gaps between methods and practical lessons for programme targeting.
The study examined Community-Based Health Insurance (CBHI) exemption lists, the Poverty Probability Index (PPI), and food insecurity measures across 3,200+ households in 104 villages. Each method identified different segments of the poor population with surprisingly little overlap.
By the numbers: Only 22% of CBHI-exempt households qualified as poor under PPI criteria, while 71% of PPI-identified poor households weren't on CBHI lists. CBHI flagged 32% of households as poor, PPI identified 23%, and food insecurity measures captured 17%.
Why it matters: These aren't targeting failures — they're capturing different dimensions of poverty. CBHI, grounded in community knowledge, prioritises households with visible vulnerabilities like illness, disability, or social isolation that standardised poverty metrics often miss. Meanwhile, PPI's asset-based approach may overlook households facing temporary shocks or less obvious hardships.
Between the lines: CBHI-exempt households showed consistently higher vulnerability across multiple indicators — more food insecurity, smaller household sizes, fewer assets, and weaker social support networks. Importantly, researchers found no indicators where PPI-identified households appeared worse off than CBHI-exempt ones.
This challenges the assumption that community-based targeting is inherently less accurate than statistical methods. Instead, it suggests they serve complementary functions in identifying different types of vulnerability.
Steal this: Use CBHI exemption lists as your primary targeting mechanism, supplemented by two simple food insecurity questions to catch ultra-poor households that fall through administrative cracks. This combined approach leverages existing systems while reducing exclusion errors.
Local verification remains crucial. Involve community leaders and health workers in validating CBHI lists before programme rollout, and advocate for digitised recordkeeping to improve reliability over time.
🤝 Join Eval4Action's first Future of Evaluation dialogue
Eval4Action is hosting a dialogue on 12 August exploring how young M&E professionals are using digital tools and fresh approaches to drive real change toward the SDGs.
Building on the momentum from the Summit for the Future of Evaluation, and aligning with the EvalTorch relay, the Future of Evaluation dialogue provides a platform for collaborative learning to future-proof evaluation.
The session will dig into specific examples of youth-led innovation in evaluation practice and examine how these approaches are actually increasing evaluation's influence on policy and programming.
Register for the 12 August session (8:00-9:30 AM ET) via the button below.
🤩 Coming Soon: Your Global Guide to M&E Master's Programs
Thinking about leveling up your M&E career with a master's degree? We've been digging deep into universities worldwide to find the graduate programs that go the extra mile and focus specifically on monitoring and evalution practice.
From Oxford's prestigious EBSIPE program to specialised degrees in Australia, Germany, Kenya, and beyond, we're mapping out the landscape of quality M&E education globally.
What's coming: A comprehensive breakdown of 20+ programs across 6 continents, with the real details on curriculum, delivery formats and costs.
Stay tuned—this lands in your inbox in the upcoming weeks.
Thanks for reading!