Monitoring & Evaluation Support for Collaborative Learning and Adapting (MESCLA) Activity Annual Work Plan Fiscal Year 2021 (October 1, 2020 – July 3,2021)

The Activity is implemented by Dexis Consulting Group under contract with USAID/Honduras. The MESCLA Activity consists of four interrelated components: evaluation, monitoring, designing and conducting analyses, surveys, studies, and assessments, and supporting improved knowledge management, learning, and collaboration within the Mission and outer stakeholders. The Activity seeks to support achievement of USAID/Honduras' Country Development Cooperation Strategy (CDCS) by assisting the Mission in planning, designing, conducting, disseminating, and learning from rigorous monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of its development activities. In Year 6, MESCLA will continue to work closely with USAID to build the staff's and the Implementing Partners' (IPs) overall Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (ME&L) capacities. The Activity will support the Mission-wide exercise of CDCS development and ensure advancement of knowledge and continuous learning that will benefit USAID program design and implementation. To accommodate close-out, the technical activities will dwindle by May, with the month of June mostly focused on closing down the field office and finalizing last deliverables. MESCLA faced a variety of challenges during Year 5, for which the Activity identified mitigation actions and drew lessons learned. The challenges centered around ensuring staff participation and engagement in Mission-wide initiatives, and adapting to contextual crisis and remote work environment. The overall strategic approach has not changed. However, MESCLA will apply the following guidelines when implementing Year 6 activities: maintaining flexibility, collaboration on planning activities, and ensuring cross-task learning. MESCLA staff meets weekly to enable cross-task learning, which is vital to MESCLA's support of the systems and integration approaches of the upcoming CDCS. The Activity will work closely with the COR and alternate COR to ensure USAID can task the project with priority activities. MESCLA will strive for transparent communication with the COR and stakeholders about tradeoffs and any adverse impact one activity might have on the others. While MESCLA can hire short and long-term consultants and sub-contract firms for specific tasks as needed, time for recruitment and contracting needs to be considered. The MESCLA Activity's expected progress towards the activity's performance indicators is presented in Section 4 of the work plan. The Activity will support the Mission's ability to determine the effectiveness of USAID-supported interventions aimed at increasing citizen security for vulnerable populations in urban, high-crime areas and sustainably reducing extreme poverty for vulnerable populations in Western Honduras. The Activity will use MESCLA's products and deliverables to improve Projects' and Activities' effectiveness through informed decision-making within the Mission, enhance USAID/Honduras' compliance with the Agency accountability requirement through continuous M&E, fill knowledge gaps by identifying new evidence and learning from a variety of sources, promote consistency with respect to how data is obtained, organized, validated, and reported to the Mission for Mission-wide use, and improve learning and adapting within the Mission, among donors, and with the Government of Honduras (GOH).