From M&E to MEALP

We looked for an organisation that uses the word MEALP. We found none. Still, it would not surprise us to see the acronym in a job advert next year. The field once called M&E has been gaining new letters for fifty years. This is the history of those letters, and of the question behind each one.

It started with a table. In 1969 Leon Rosenberg developed the logical framework for USAID, or logframe for short. In four rows you set out the goal, the results, the activities and the means. Next to them went the indicators and how you would check them. That gave monitoring and evaluation a fixed place in every development programme.

In 1991 the OECD set out how to evaluate a programme. The criteria were relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, impact and sustainability. Two letters were enough: M for following what you do, E for judging whether it worked. The question behind them was the funder’s. After a grant, a foundation wanted to know: was our money well spent? The report to the board gave the answer.

It soon became clear that judging is not the same as learning. An evaluation at the end of a programme comes too late to change anything. In 2001 Canada’s IDRC published Outcome Mapping. Its subtitle said it all: building learning and reflection into development programmes.

So M&E slowly became MEL, or M&E&L. The L stood for learning. The question moved from the funder to the team itself: what do we do with this?

Around the turn of the century, the humanitarian sector took a hard look at itself. Aid arrived, but those who received it had little say. In 2003 the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership began. It was the first international body in which aid agencies held each other to their duty towards the people they helped.

In 2014 came the Core Humanitarian Standard. Accountability now also ran to the people at the centre of the work, not only to whoever pays. That is how the A entered the acronym: MEAL. The question became: can participants hold us to account for what we do?

Meanwhile the acronym grew at both ends. In 2009 UNDP published a handbook that brought planning and monitoring into one guide. The P for planning moved to the front: PM&E, and later PMEL.

In 2014 a conference in Washington was still called M&E Tech. A year later it was MERL Tech. The R stood for research, the L for learning. In 2016 USAID asked its country offices for plans to collaborate, learn and adapt. That approach, CLA in USAID’s words, soon came with a MEL plan.

In 2019 the MEAL DPro appeared, a guide and a certificate for anyone who wants to learn the trade. That same year the OECD added coherence as a sixth criterion. And in 2024 ACT Alliance brought out a new version of its manual. It is called PMEAL: planning, monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning.

Along the way came variants such as MERLA, with an A for adapting, and MELIA, which adds impact assessment. Read job adverts and you will see them used side by side. Behind a title such as MEAL officer there is often the same work as behind M&E officer. Sometimes not.

In October 2026 the evaluator Daniel Ticehurst wrote about it with some scorn. He called it an alphabet soup. In his view a new letter solves little if the questions underneath stay the same.

He has a point. Yet every letter tells you something. Each one stands for a group or a purpose that was forgotten at first. The E came for the funder, the L for the team, the A for participants. The R came for those who want to know why something works, the P for those who want to think ahead.

If a P were to follow MEAL, participation would be the obvious choice. Not only accounting to participants, but letting them take part in what you measure. Whether it will ever be called that matters little. What matters is the question you ask of your own work: who are you measuring for, and who is still missing?