Rethinking MEAL for Community-Centred Impact

Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL) offers a backbone for tracking progress, assessing impact and need, ensuring accountability, and fostering continuous learning. Over the years, the approaches under MEAL have been refined to better understand problems and the impact of solutions, particularly by encouraging the meaningful participation of communities closest to the problem. Their voices offer a reality check: how problems and solutions play out on the ground, in lived experience rather than reported outcomes.

Why place communities at the centre?

Communities are closest to the problem. Their insights help us understand the actual reality of both the challenge and the response: how programmes affect them, what other dimensions of their lives are shaped by these changes, and what it might take to respond more effectively. As Alessandro Portelli has noted, the way people remember events shapes their perception of reality and, by extension, how they live their lives. That texture adds depth to the problem-solution landscape, bringing in emotion, silence, and context as part of the story.

Communities and their knowledge are central to understanding the depth and complexity of social problems. Yet traditional MEAL methods rarely capture this knowledge as it is. Scribbled notes, keywords, and interpretations create gaps between:

(i) what is said and what is recorded;
(ii) the details and context that get lost in translation;
(iii) the interpretive lens brought by interviewers and analysts, which can shift the meaning of responses; and
(iv) the constraints of predefined checkboxes and categories, which limit the scope of what can be expressed.

The result is a systemic loss of knowledge and meaning as community voices are converted, reduced, and filtered. What is needed is a genuine commitment to deeper listening.

Deep Listening: The ‘All Ears’ Approach

Coined by American composer and experimental music pioneer Pauline Oliveros, deep listening has been adapted in the social sector as a practice for understanding community and stakeholder needs. Much as Oliveros described deep listening as going beyond the surface of what is heard, this practice in the social sector creates a space of curiosity, empathy, and non-judgmental attention, aimed at understanding the speaker, their lived experience, and their context. It is shaped by the quality of how the listener and speaker engage with one another.

Most MEAL approaches place emphasis on quantitative data, on what can be measured. We’ve designed Apurva to strengthen qualitative understanding of the ground, rooted in the practice of deep listening. The aim is to surface the deeper why and how behind communities’ experiences and real-world change, going beyond numbers.

The Why behind it

Community voices are a distinct form of knowledge. Tacit and grounded in personal experience, including successes, failures, and innovations, they offer a bottom-up view that complements institutional knowledge. Deep listening opens space for communities to express themselves fully, and crucially, it does not standardise narratives. Instead, it holds space for perspectives in their full complexity.

Consider one example. In response to a question about why commons matter, a community member described how commons shape their lives and identities, how everyone depends on them, and yet how their protection is consistently hindered by neglect, delayed action, and diffuse responsibility.

This response was gathered through a feedback and review assessment by an organisation working with rural communities on ecological restoration, livelihoods, and commons across India. Using Apurva, they brought in the voices of over 100 community members to understand how their programmes affected daily life, shifts in women’s and youth participation, and changes to shared lands, water bodies, and livelihoods.

In their words: “This approach was intended to increase participation and allow first-mile users to express their perspectives in their own voice.” They found that communities sharing in their own languages and voices made the process more inclusive and brought in more diverse perspectives.

A clear picture emerged. 58% of respondents reported improved cooperation and transparency, while others flagged weakened ties and a need for greater accountability from authorities. The variation in responses, however, circled back to the same underlying reality: commons are woven into people’s lives and identity, but protecting them remains caught between neglect, delayed action, and diffuse responsibility.

Sandra Harding’s standpoint theory explains something similar: diverse perspectives offer different viewpoints on the same problem, refracted through socio-political, cultural, historical, and other lenses. This enables deeper inquiry into the problem-solution landscape, broadens the frame of analysis, shifts authority away from dominant assumptions, and can reduce embedded bias.

Community voices go beyond diverse perspectives. They offer a spectrum of viewpoints, rooted in context and nuance, that are otherwise lost when just adopting the traditional MEAL practice of keywords and checkboxes.

An organisation that conducts impact assessments and provides financial support to partners put it this way: “It adds a human element to our quantitative datasets and surfaces themes that we might otherwise miss on our own.”

What it leads to

What partner organisations have found, and what we have seen at Apurva, is that deep listening consistently opens up the same things: more inclusive participation, greater nuance from communities, and a clearer view of the problem.

An organisation working in women’s healthcare in rural India set out to understand what shifted through a programme of community meetings focused on healthcare awareness. Apurva, they noted, “made it possible to capture unseen and subtle changes, especially around mindsets, confidence, and accountability.” These early shifts in hygiene, diet, and agency became the foundation of their theory of change at scale.

When invisible changes are made visible, they do not just inform better understanding. They reshape how problems are defined and how solutions are designed.

By converting qualitative feedback into structured insights, an organisation working on ecological restoration and commons was able to identify gaps they had not previously seen and to redesign their programme around them. As they described it: “This also provides an opportunity to close the feedback loop, ensuring that community inputs directly inform programme adjustments and decision-making.”

The insights surfaced from community voices also turned the lens inward. Organisations found that the quality of what they were hearing depended significantly on survey design, the clarity of questions, and the field team’s ability to probe effectively. By creating conditions for communities to share in depth, they not only gathered richer insights but also encouraged communities to take ownership of their own knowledge.

Conclusion

All of these points to one thing: when communities are genuinely listened to, the knowledge that emerges is richer, more trusted, and more useful. The question is no longer whether community voices matter. It is whether our systems are built to truly hear them. We’ll explore this in Part 2.

Reference

• Kumar, S., Kanodia, S., Collins, D., & Roy, R. (2025). Deep listening for impact measurement. Stanford Social Innovation Review. https://doi.org/10.48558/N3NB-T615
• Adichie, C. N. (2009, July). The danger of a single story [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg
• Portelli, A. [TED]. (2024, April 25). Oral history: a web of relationship | Alessandro Portelli | TEDxNTUA [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWj5f6vqBFo. 
• Bowell, T. (n.d.). Feminist standpoint theory. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/fem-stan/