Tom Billington
Bio
Thomas Billington's EAForum account. I am the co-founder of Fish Welfare Initiative. I also work as a Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Associate at The Mission Motor.
My particular areas of passion are:
- Creating change for farmed animals in low and middle-income countries
- Bringing better monitoring and evaluation to the animal movement
How others can help me
If you are interested in researching, supporting, or as becoming an early stage hire of an organisation answering questions around how we can create change for animals in LMICs, I would be interested in connecting.
How I can help others
If you want free M&E support for you animal project, email me at: tombillington@themissionmotor.org
I am also considering pro-bono consulting for groups working in LMICs for animals, especially those working directly with farmers. If you would be interested in chatting, let me know.
Posts 11
Comments21
Strong agree.
And I understand why this is a problem. It can be hard to independently create contacts in these spaces from scratch, and there is an aspect of not knowing what you don't know at play. I'm almost certain I am committing the same mistake in multiple places in my work.
Would be interested to think about solutions here. Like perhaps a group such as Consultants For Impact could take on a role of knowledge dispersal, doing things like getting project management experts to give a talks at EAGs?
For sure!
I would say that EAs are missing large parts of M&E, including:
- The formal setting of key questions / assumptions that form the basis of what you will focus on trying to answer
- Creating formal monitoring frameworks (e.g. a log frame) that takes these questions / assumptions and identifies practical indicators and a method of measuring them
- I think EAs don't use the full diversity of M&E tools. In my experience we tend to over-index on surveys (vs., say, interviews, focus group discussion, or observational data)
- I think considering the frequency of use of surveys, we could generally up-skill in high-quality survey design
- Using a diverse set of evaluation types (EAs generally know about RCTs, but these are such a narrow slice of the available evaluation types)
In general I think we care about M&E but lack experience in the formal processes of it, especially monitoring. So application is patchy and not generally in line with best practices.
I should perhaps clarify that I am mostly talking about the non-global development side of EA. I think their norms for M&E are significantly better.
Intrac's M&E universe is one place to see an overview of what M&E entails. I think also The Mission Motor intends to create more resources on these topics in the future :)
My advice for EAs who want to skill up in a neglected area:
- Get a good mentor who broadly aligns with EA values but already has the skill. I’ve had three of these relationships (with experts in fish welfare, M&E, and agricultural development). In each case, it was symbiotic: I could offer EA knowledge and connections in return for them teaching me their skillset.
- Book calls with as many relevant people as possible in the field. Shamelessly ask for help, even from people only tangentially related to what you’re trying to learn. The more you snowball contacts, the better your chances of finding a mentor. Also, having lots of people explain the fundamentals to you repeatedly is very useful, as it helps you learn the core ideas of the field.
- Read a lot. Try to consume a lot of media from the chosen field. You know you’re doing well when you start to notice consistent underlying patterns and premises (again, the core ideas).
- Start applying it before you’re ready. Look for small projects you can use as practice for the new skill.
In general, when learning a new skill, Andrea Gunn’s talk on training leaders offers a lot of good insight. I also made a one-page summary of her talk.
I have historically been able to do this upskilling as a side project to my existing job.
Tom from The Mission Motor here (have also done some more general M&E consulting in the EA space).
In my opinion, there is a lot of room for growth in M&E best practice in the (non-global development) EA space. There is often an appetite for M&E, but there is a real lack of knowledge and expertise. This to me presents a big opportunity where behaviour change is needed and also easier to obtain (though still not easy).
You can also have a snowball effect if you change the norms in the EA space. Personally, I feel like current concepts of measuring progress and impact in (again, mostly non-global dev) EA spaces are rudimentary. For example, we tend to focus on speculative cost-effective analysis as the primary method of assessing projects, even when they are still in the ideation phase. I believe this is, at least in part, because there is not an understanding of alternate M&E tools (e.g. setting up a good monitoring system for evaluating a theory of change).
I exclude the global development space as ideas from groups like IPA and IDInsight have permeated more there.
So my opinion would be strongly pro-working with EAs.
Cool! Would be keen to sign on to a mailing list :)