Francesca D'Emidio | Bond | The international development network

Francesca D'Emidio is the Founder and Director of Learning and Change. Since 2017, she has been supporting INGOs and international development agencies with the development of Value for Money and Monitoring and Evaluation frameworks and was an Associate Trainer for Bond between 2015 and 2022, delivering the training 'Putting Value for Money into Practice'.

Formerly, she was a Monitoring and Evaluation Advisor for ActionAid's International Secretariat supporting the design and implementation of ActionAid's Monitoring and Evaluation approach and leading a pilot project on Value for Money funded by the then UK Department for International Development (DFID). Francesca has had experience working in Ethiopia, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Malawi, South Africa, Mozambique, Uganda, South Sudan, Pakistan, Myanmar, Thailand, Brazil, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, Dominican Republic and remotely supported programmes in a variety of other countries. She spent most of her early career in Latin America working for a variety of organizations including the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Save the Children, ACRA and others in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras.

Learning and Change is a consultancy company founded in January 2020 to respond to the growing demand to support international organizations wanting to improve their impact and make a difference in the lives of the people they work with. Learning and Change puts the impact on vulnerable people at the centre of what it does and its work aims to support organizations to make change happen. Its approaches are bottom-up and participatory as it usually works directly with the people and communities targeted by development and humanitarian programmes, making their voice central to the methodologies adopted.

Learning and Change provides services in the following areas:

Value for Money- We have been working on Value for Money since 2013, supporting organizations in developing their own understanding in line with the organizational values, principles and overall vision and see Value for Money not only as an accountability tool but also as an opportunity to foster learning about what works. We have developed methodologies and tools to help organizations measure, analyse and demonstrate Value for Money to their key stakeholders. We are experts in the design and implementation of participatory Value for Money analysis tools which enable key community actors to have a voice and to assess whether a programme is worth the investment.

Monitoring and Evaluation- We support organizations to develop user-centred Monitoring and Evaluation (ME) systems and work closely with programme leads to tailor ME approaches to the specific needs of each organization, provide training to local partners and ensure the systems are fit for purpose. Recently, we have been working on ME approaches based on Outcome Harvesting to foster organizational and programmatic learning and improve impact. We also provide evaluation services, assessing programmes to understand the change generated and identify effective recommendations that organizations can implement to improve programme quality. We use a variety of methodologies, often combining a range of them to ensure that the analytical frameworks address appropriately the evaluation questions and have particular expertise in participatory methodologies.

Facilitation- We are experienced facilitators and have supported several organisations to organise and deliver strategic planning meetings and retreats, review workshops, retreats, team building, etc. We use a variety of interactive techniques that allow participants to use efficiently their time and achieve the intended outcomes.

Research- We are experienced researchers and work with our clients to develop clear and usable research questions and project manage research projects as well as lead, in a hands-on way, the development of the research methodology, framework and plan. We train data collectors and enumerators and guide the analytical approach and process to draw out conclusions which are relevant to the research questions and to the stakeholders involved. We have particular expertise in facilitating participatory research as well as Action Learning and other methodologies and approaches focussed on taking corrective measures and improving programme results.