A Decade of MERL Innovation – LINC
This is the third of four blogs LINC is publishing to celebrate its 10th anniversary.
Welcome to the third entry of LINC’s 10th-anniversary blog series!
If you’ve been following along, in our first entry, “Getting to Know LINC”, you learned about LINC’s history and vision, its people, and that “working alongside local actors to create sustained change” is what inspires LINC’s work. From our second entry, “A Decade Supporting Locally Led Development”, you learned about LINC’s focus on locally led development, and how our work with and support to local organizations in Mexico showed us how locally led development not only leads to sustainable solutions but also serves as a multiplier of development opportunities that we are still witnessing ten years later.
In our third entry, we share our experience in Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL), which is currently LINC’s largest practice area. We discuss how our evaluation and research work has taken LINC to almost every corner of the world, allowing us to work with communities, government, and private sector actors from a wide range of countries and cultures, testing innovative tools and approaches, and how research and learning is imbedded in LINC’s DNA.
Since its early years, LINC has been actively involved in assessing, compiling, and sharing best practices, strategies, and impacts of development programs that empower local actors to lead their own development. As we often say, we help development actors understand what works and what doesn’t. LINC does this by using a variety of tools and techniques to better design, capture, and understand impact and change, and to elevate the perspectives of local actors involved in the processes. LINC’s MERL efforts are conducted in collaboration with national and international universities, think tanks, NGOs, and government and private sector partners.