Strategies for Successful Implementation: Guidance for Addressing Technical Climate-SRHR MEL Challenges

Strategic Guidance for Developing Climate-SRHR MEL Plans at the Portfolio Level

A portfolio’s scope and goals influence indicator selection.

As you begin developing a MEL plan for your portfolio, take time to reflect on the scope and goals of your portfolio.
What does your portfolio invest in? What is excluded? Why?

If the portfolio is explicitly focused on climate change and SRHR, you can require grantees to use indicators specific to climate change and SRHR across their activities. This will help ensure project data can be aggregated to generate the portfolio metrics you need. 

If the portfolio is specifically focused on a particular approach or SRHR outcome, such as policy action, menstrual health, supply chain strengthening, etc. you can choose more narrow portfolio indicators that reflect your focus. 

If the portfolio focuses on pilots, proof-of-concept, and early-stage innovations, you should prioritize output indicators which can be measured effectively in the short-term and suggest the potential for future impact. 

If the portfolio is focused on SRHR investments generally, which may or may not include climate, you may wish the institute a minimum requirement for climate considerations across all investments and/or institute specific requirements for the sub-set of investments which are focused on climate. This will support consistency across all investments.

If the portfolio includes a broad range of climate-SRHR actions, it may be more advantageous to prioritize broader portfolio indicators which can readily reflect the types of work you implement. 

If the portfolio focuses on scaling, institutionalization, and long-term investments, you should integrate impact measures and longer term outcome measures that can be documented through rigorous evaluations to document change generated.

As you think about the goals of your portfolio, take time to also reflect on how you intend to use the data you gather.

What data do you need to demonstrate the portfolio’s success and accelerate change? Who are you trying to reach with this data?

If your target audience is SRHR-focused actors, you may need to focus on selecting indicators that will generate evidence regarding the impacts of climate change on SRH outcomes, and the positive benefits of climate-responsiveness for SRH outcomes.

If your target audience values numbers and statistics, you may wish to prioritize quantitative data and rigorous pre-/post-evaluations.

If the target audience is climate-focused actors or other stakeholders, you may wish to prioritize climate indicators which are already familiar to the climate community. It may be beneficial to link the impacts of climate change on SRH to broader impacts related to gender equity, economy, education, etc. 

If your target audience values stories and human impact, you may wish to promote qualitative data and multi-media storytelling, such as photography, video, and audio.

Indicators should reflect your needs - and set grantees up for success.

The indicators that you select for your portfolio will likely include both 1) indicators that are aggregated up from project-level indicators and 2) indicators which are monitored at the national or portfolio level.

Aggregated project-level indicators allow a portfolio to demonstrate the success generated directly through its investments. When developing MEL guidance for grantees, be sure to include any requirements or specification around project-level indicators that are necessary to generate your desired aggregate indicators. You may need to refine indicator definitions and guidance on measurement approaches and frequency to reflect the needs and goals of your portfolio and its grantees. You may also wish to explicitly integrate opportunities for participatory and community-led MEL approaches within this guidance.

Indicators monitored at the national or portfolio level allow a portfolio to demonstrate its long-term impact and its successes beyond the projects it invests in. When selecting these indicators, be sure to ensure that you have the appropriate level of staffing necessary to monitor these indicators on an ongoing basis. 

Investment and programming at the intersection of climate change and SRHR is nascent: funders, implementers, and researchers are all working to generate evidence, identify best practices, and determine the most effective approaches. Given the urgency of the issue, it is critical that we take action now and learn as we go. Doing so, however, requires all stakeholders to openly share both successes and challenges. Fostering strong relationships with your grantees, where success is about not only outcomes but also clear documentation of challenges, barriers, and ineffective approaches, is critical to ensuring that we, as a global community, can learn together and allocate limited resources effectively. 

Climate SRHR-MEL must be well-resourced - but it’s a worthwhile investment.

Climate-SRHR investments may require additional resources for MEL, both because they require unique technical capacity and because they require monitoring additional contextual factors which are not tracked in standard SRHR investments, such as exposure to extreme weather or the status of climate policies. 

There are also a few additional factors specific to climate-SRHR portfolios that funders should consider when resourcing MEL in their portfolios:

  • Grassroots organizations: Small grassroots organizations may lack the technical capacity to develop and implement rigorous, mixed-methods MEL plans. For these organizations, technical support with MEL budgeting as well as indicator selection, MEL plan refinement, and reporting.

  • Climate crises: When a climate crisis or extreme weather event occurs during implementation, it can be a valuable opportunity to document how a project may contribute to climate resilience and/or how climate change is impacting SRHR action. However, gathering data and impact stories during such events requires time, money, and human capacity. 

  • Innovation and adaptation: Some organizations may struggle to recognize what is truly innovative or adaptive about their project’s approach. Others may fail to recognize maladaptation - that is, adaptive behaviors that come with a high cost or negative consequences. However, effectively identifying these adaptations and translating lessons learned into opportunities for future adaptation is a critical component of ensuring that climate-SRHR programing effectively contributes to greater climate resilience. Technical support, close collaboration, and outside reviewers can support perspective shifts. 

  • Research: Organizations who want to conduct action research throughout their programming may face additional expenses, particularly related to ethical approvals, research staffing, data analysis, and publication costs. However, research is an important component of building the climate-SRHR evidence base and ensuring programmatic learnings are documented in a way that is accessible and impactful. Offering supplemental research grants can support this form of evidence generation and dissemination. 

  • Storytelling: Grantees may not have internal resources for photography, videography, podcast/radio recording, graphic design, social media outreach, or other aspects of effective storytelling. Offering supplemental storytelling grants, setting requirements in calls for proposals, and/or having technical capacity available to support can all enhance storytelling across these projects. 

  • Long-term impact: Change takes time - even more so when projects engage with challenging issues like SRHR and climate change. For many projects, the true impact of their work may not be visible for years to come. Portfolios can play an important role by resourcing post-project evaluations, tracking national trends, and monitoring uptake and scaling of activities from previous investments. Portfolios should also consider duration of investments and timing of activities when developing programmatic and portfolio targets. 

Setting budgetary minimums and providing supplemental technical capacity can go a long way in ensuring a portfolio’s climate-SRHR investments generate the evidence needed to effectively respond to challenges and ensure successful implementation.

Use data to adjust your approach and identify “best bets.”

Many of the indicators proposed in Indicators for Climate-SRHR Action focus on tracking implementation progress, project design and resourcing, portfolio reach, and progress towards impact. These data can provide valuable insights into what strategies are effective and what opportunities exist for refining your approach. This could look like:

  • Scaling up effective activities to new regions

  • Adjusting implementation approaches to promote inclusivity or integrate best practices 

  • Instituting portfolio-wide processes for reporting, technical support, dissemination, etc. 

  • Establishing quality standards or documentation protocols for consistent reporting

  • Resourcing new investments to close critical data gaps or track longer-term impact

Tool: Using data to inform portfolio strategy

The Measure and Adjust section of our climate-SRHR strategy guidance provides information on how pilot evidence can be used to inform future investments, while the Refine Portfolio Strategy section provides guidance on how evidence from previous and current investments can be used to strengthen the portfolio’s overall investment approach.

When it comes to identifying effective practices suitable for scaling, SRHR impact is the most important element of determining if something is a scalable concept or “best bet.” This means that:

  • Clear evidence was generated about the positive impact of this project on SRHR

  • That evidence was used to inform guidelines and norms 

In practice, this means that the project had a positive impact on people reached and there is additional information that advocates can use to hold governments accountable. Strong causal pathways and evidence for SRHR impact is the minimum bar for funding a project.

Once that evidence has been established, several other factors are also important: 

  • Readiness to scale and sustainability: Scale can look different in different contexts. It can include many different aspects of getting health systems climate resilient. Sustainability can include engagement of local stakeholders, fostering collaboration with local governments (ideally aligned with national priorities and integrated into national health systems), or adoption by systems, such as piloting, proof of concept, or adoption by the government.

  • Strong partnerships: Evidence of partners’ strong relationships and ability to link to and leverage other funding sources is critical. When activities strengthen organizational and leadership capacity, implementers can be strong in their sector and go-to leaders. This can look like other organizations coming to them for insights, the Ministry of Health relying on them for data or evidence, etc. 

  • Climate adaptation benefits and co-benefits: For projects focused on responding to climate hazards, it is also important to demonstrate clear benefits for climate adaptation. Even projects focused specifically on SRHR can demonstrate co-benefits for climate adaptation through their work. This may look like generating evidence about adaptive behaviors, improved policy, strengthened infrastructure, knowledge gained, or advances made in other sectors, such as gender equity, agriculture, education, etc. 

  • Demonstrated demand: It is important to know who is going to pay for the concept in the long run (e.g., a customer or a public pathway to scale). “Best bet” activities should be relevant to government priorities and have a path towards budgetary allocations. Signals of this include government cooperation towards evidence generation/early scaling, and documentation of if this area of impact is an explicit part of government priorities. 


Other factors, like competitive advantage, opportunities for leverage, and cost efficiency may factor in later on in the pathway to scaling.