If you’ve been reading NGO job ads lately, you’ve probably noticed a trend. A few years back, everyone was hiring an “M&E Officer.” Now, they’re all looking for a MEAL Coordinator, a MEL Manager, a MERL Adviser, or a MEARL Lead. The acronyms keep changing, but the pattern is pretty consistent: they’re all bundling monitoring, evaluation, accountability, learning, and sometimes research into a single role, a single team, and a single budget line.
Here at TDSO, we use the term “M&E” and we’re sticking with it. This isn’t because we’re against accountability, learning, or research, we absolutely value all those things. And it’s not just a pointless argument over words. Our reasoning is structural, and it all comes down to one key distinction.
Mark Desmaele
Founder and Chairman at TDSO
Some of those letters name a tool. Others name a duty.
Monitoring and evaluation together are a tool. They’re how we systematically measure our own work against what we set out to do. It’s a specialist job; it needs specific methods and skills, and it works best when done by dedicated people who have some independence from the projects they’re measuring. You can and should have a specialist team for that.
But accountability (the A) and organisational adaptation (the heart of the L)? Those aren’t tools. They’re obligations. They’re the very conditions of being a manager. Accountability is about being answerable: someone can call us to task, and we must respond. Adaptation is about changing our course based on what we’re learning, and that’s the essence of steering the ship, and steering is what management is for. These kinds of duties can’t be handed off to a separate unit. You can get support with them, but the responsibility always lands back on the people in charge.
The problem with those longer acronyms is that they fuse a tool and two obligations together as if they were one job. And in doing so, they invite organisations to stick them all in the same box. The tool belongs there. The obligations don’t.
Where Did All These Letters Come From?
The shift from M&E to MEAL/MERL wasn’t a single event. Looking back, there are at least four different threads that got woven together, and that alone is a good reason to be suspicious of treating them as one discipline.
The first thread is the results agenda. Since the 1990s, with results-based management and the Paris Declaration, donors have pushed organisations harder and harder to prove they’re effective. This is accountability in its “upward” direction, answering to donors and boards. It made measurement more formal and more prominent.
The “A” came from the opposite direction. After the Rwanda genocide, evaluations exposed huge failures in how humanitarian organisations answered to the very people they were supposed to help. This led to the Sphere Project and the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership. This kind of accountability is “downward”, being answerable to the affected communities, who are rights-holders. It’s about the relationship between an organisation and the people it serves, not a data-collection activity.
So, the word “accountability” entered the mix twice, from opposite directions, meaning two totally different relationships. A single “A” in an acronym is already oversimplifying things.
The “L” grew out of a realisation in the evaluation field that evidence was being produced but not used. This led to a push for “learning” and “adaptive management,” which was later codified by big donors like USAID. They made it a requirement, but it started as an internal effort to close the gap between data and action.
And the “R” has the weakest claim to being essential. Some organisations do research, so they add it to make MERL or MEARL. Others don’t, so they don’t. It’s an optional extra, not a core component.
So, there you have it: an upward accountability agenda, a downward rights agenda, a professional movement turned into donor policy, and an organisational choice. They’re all different things with different origins. And the fact that the acronyms still haven’t settled- MEAL, MEL, MERL, MERLA, MEARL all coexisting- shows they’re all describing the same job. The labels are just multiplying over an unchanged role. That’s about how we present the work, not the birth of a new profession.
What’s the Risk of Bundling It All Together?
When an organisation creates a “MEAL” team, it’s essentially telling itself that responsibilities which should belong to every manager now have a specific home on the org chart. Now, nothing forces everyone else to check out. You can have a bundled unit and a strong culture of accountability, or a plain M&E department and a weak one. Structure doesn’t determine behaviour. But it does shape perception. And the risk is that people start to see accountability and adaptation as the specialists’ job. Once that happens, managers defer questions of answerability to the MEAL team, and “learning” becomes a series of workshops that the unit organises, rather than something programs do as a matter of course. The unit ends up absorbing the appearance of the obligation while the real substance quietly fades away everywhere else. The very thing meant to strengthen accountability ends up displacing them, the opposite of what was intended.
Of course, the practical work around these things still needs support. Someone must run the complaints mechanism, collect feedback, organise reflection sessions, and keep the evidence in order. Our objection isn’t to having support staff. It’s to moving the responsibility. You can delegate the execution, but you can’t delegate answerability.
Now, you might ask: doesn’t a dedicated M&E function create the same risk? Doesn’t it let managers off the hook for thinking about evidence? No, and here’s why: measurement is a specialist task. Concentrating it is how you make it reliable. But being answerable and being willing to change course are not specialist tasks; they are what managing is. You can concentrate a specialist tool. You can’t concentrate a condition of management, no matter what you name the unit. You’re just changing where people look.
The bundled model was a response to a real problem. Independent M&E often produced reports that just sat on desks and changed nothing. Adding the L and A was supposed to close that loop, the same system that produced the evidence would also be responsible for using it. The diagnosis was correct, but the remedy was wrong. If management doesn’t act on evidence, that’s a management failure. The answer is to hold management accountable for it, not to create a unit to “own” the using. You can’t outsource the use of evidence any more than you can outsource the responsibility for results.
How It Works in Practice
The arrangement we defend at TDSO is a two-step process with two distinct owners. M&E produces an accurate reading of our work and reports it to management. Management then works with that reading, they act, they adapt, and they answer for the results. These are two different processes. The first is measurement; the second is management being accountable and adaptable. The report is the hand-off between them.
The best analogy is internal audit. An internal audit function sits inside the organisation, but its independence of judgment is protected. The people being audited can’t edit the findings. Audit provides assurance; management owns the operations and the response to the audit’s findings. Audit is answerable for the quality of its assurance, not for the organisation’s performance. M&E works the same way. It’s accountable for the integrity of the measurement; management is accountable for the performance being measured and what they do with the information. The independence M&E needs is independence of judgment, not independence from the reporting line. It can report to management and still be trusted, as long as one condition holds: the people being assessed can’t rewrite the assessment.
A Note on Research
Research raises the same question of placement. It depends on which direction the inquiry is facing. Forward-looking research, scanning the field, understanding the problem, testing new approaches before a program is built, is an input to design. It belongs with program development. Backwards-looking research into whether our own work succeeded isn’t really research; it’s evaluation, and it belongs with M&E and the protected judgment that evaluation requires. They both use similar evidence, which is why the line must be drawn by purpose, not by data: research interrogates the field, evaluation judges the program.
Our Bottom Line
We decline the composite label because it lumps together things that are fundamentally different, and in doing so, it creates the structural risk I described. M&E is a different kind of shorthand. It names two facets of a single tool that share a purpose and can share a home.
So, to be clear: Measurement sits with a distinct M&E function, reporting to management, with independence of judgment protected. Accountability, in both directions, is borne by management and, through them, the whole organisation. The mechanisms that serve it, like feedback and complaints channels, can be run by staff, but the responsibility stays with management. Adaptation happens where steering happens, informed by what M&E reports. And forward-looking research sits with program development.
It all comes down to one sentence: Evidence can be delegated; responsibility cannot.