By Tara Bajracharya, Federica Di Battista and Craig Irwin.
This blog explores how the Portfolio Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (PMEL) Nepal function supports the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) Nepal –the British Embassy Kathmandu (BEK) more broadly – to apply a portfolio approach to aid delivery.
The origin story: Why PMEL in Nepal?
In 2017, while still recovering from a decade-long civil war and devastating earthquakes, Nepal began its move from being a unitary to a federal state. The UK sought to use this opportunity to enhance the results of its development efforts. First, it did some soul searching, undertaking an internal review of its investments in the country. This led to a shift in the way the then-Department for International Development (DFID) (now FCDO) thought about its portfolio and the role it played in this complex environment. The review suggested that DFID needed continually to assess the portfolio in response to the changes Nepal was now undertaking, and to ensure learning and evidence-based course corrections were applied. To achieve this, DFID designed two sister projects: Research on Nepal’s Transition to Federalism (RENT) and PMEL. These projects aimed to ensure UK support remained aware of and relevant to the complex and evolving context (the focus of RENT) and to gauge how the DFID portfolio in Nepal was responding to this changing context (PMEL).
In this blog, we zoom in on PMEL to see what this looks like in practice, and how it supported evidence uptake for portfolio-level learning and decision-making in the FCDO. It highlights some experiences that may help similar functions within and outside the FCDO ecosystem.
Building the big picture view
Since starting in 2020, PMEL supported FCDO Nepal to cultivate a portfolio approach to aid delivery. Over the years, PMEL and the FCDO co-created a set of learning questions that guide data and evidence generation beyond individual programmes and bring a portfolio perspective on key areas of interest and relevance.
So, what does generating portfolio data or building portfolio picture look like? Whether it’s an interactive MIS that maps portfolio footprints across sectors and geographies, or a focused slide deck to drive discussions on ways of working, PMEL has worked to ensure FCDO Nepal gets timely insights that are most relevant in current thinking within the organisation. This has also meant that PMEL has used its resources to prioritise ‘good enough’—indicative but timely evidence—over waiting for perfect data that arrives too late to be useful. Instead of chasing static completeness in data, PMEL creates a dynamic, evolving picture, refining and expanding the portfolio view through ongoing insights from stakeholders. This approach keeps the learning loop short and responsive.
Strengthening portfolio coherence
If there is one problem that PMEL is designed to help solve, it is a ‘siloed’ approach to aid delivery. By providing a comprehensive view of the FCDO Nepal’s portfolio footprint: who is doing what, where, when, and in collaboration with which stakeholders, PMEL facilitates stronger coordination and coherence across projects, programmes, and people, enabling them to leverage each other’s work and entry points. PMEL also examines approaches to delivery at the portfolio level, focusing on diverse learning areas: from how the Embassy engages with stakeholders to support local leadership, to how technical assistance is deployed across the portfolio to strengthen government systems.
This has enabled PMEL to inject consistency into approaches to learning and adaptation. For example, PMEL has supported building a shared understanding of adaptive management, facilitating key discussions and offering tools that strengthen adaptive management in practice.
A murmuration of starlings to symbolise portfolio coherence: projects moving in an interconnected way towards a shared direction. Source: BBC wildlife magazine
Creating portfolio dialogues
Evidence uptake is shaped by timing, context, and user readiness. Rather than waiting for a decisive moment, PMEL facilitates ongoing discussions and deliberations on portfolio evidence, pausing when traction is low and resurfacing insights when the timing is right. Whenever PMEL Nepal paints the big picture and asks questions like “is the balance of portfolio support across the layers of government right?” it is enabling portfolio dialogues. This is an innovation that (in systems language) can change the “mental models” that attach people to siloed and projectised ways of thinking and working.
Back to Why PMEL
In the dynamic world of international development, an adaptive PMEL function responds to shifting donor priorities and organisational changes, supporting and reinforcing the client’s strategic learning agenda. More importantly, it can shift the focus from parts (projects/programmes) to the whole (portfolio). Having withstood the test of time (surviving Covid, budget cuts, organizational changes, and much more), the PMEL experience shows that institutionalising such a learning function is one sure way to prioritize learning and thinking as a collective portfolio, even when doing so is challenging. Through patience, effective relationships, and constant and consistent presence, PMEL Nepal has helped move the focus away from the trees to the wood, from individual project siloes to the whole FCDO Nepal portfolio.
Fast forward to 2025. PMEL is now in its fifth year of implementation and has inspired other FCDO PMEL facilities across the world, including in Nigeria and Kenya. For more on portfolio approaches, listen to Systems Practice in International Development podcast, a PMEL initiative implemented by Abt Global and funded by FCDO Nepal.
Governance and Development Soapbox 
Thanks for the article on the PMEL Nepal experience. It’s a good example of how MEL can operate beyond the project level – helping development partners zoom out, connect the dots, and adapt in real time. A lot of it resonated with my time leading Australia’s bilateral health program in Fiji.
But there’s one critical lesson I’d add: being adaptive doesn’t mean being vague.
For MEL to be useful – whether in a single program or across a portfolio – you need to clearly define what problems you’re trying to solve and what success looks like. That clarity gives learning a purpose. Without it, MEL becomes abstract and more of a communications tool than a way to drive programming. The most agile system in the world won’t help much if you’re not clear on what you’re actually adapting toward – and worse, it’ll lead to a convoluted, disjoined program with (no doubt) poor MEL.
In Fiji, we had to navigate the Covid response, legacy projects and systems, and resistance to much-needed reforms. Flexibility was essential. But we always came back to a core set of outcomes we were trying to achieve. That’s what kept our MEL focused – and our projects, teams and budget aligned on our goals.
And here’s my take: MEL often gets blamed when programs underperform. It’s easier to say “our MEL system was weak” than to admit the program design and implementation itself didn’t hold up. But MEL isn’t magic. It can’t fix a vague and multi-directional strategy that changes every quarter.
While flexibility/adaptability is important, we need to ensure our goals are clear and our budget, programs and MEL are aligned to these. It’s a hybrid approach – agile and traditional – but it will enable more effective change, and provide the evidence to both demonstrate the positive impact we are having and build the business case for bigger reforms.
LikeLike
Hi Phil, Great points! Being adaptive is certainly no excuse for poor design. As you rightly say, clarity on outcomes is essential. Adaptation should shape how we get there, not blur where we’re headed. Of course, in some cases, shifting contexts may call for revisiting outcomes too. Your point about MEL taking the blame resonates; oftentimes, programme and MEL design are treated as disconnected exercises. In reality, strong programme design requires space for strategic learning, and MEL only adds value when it actively sharpens that learning.
LikeLike