 The Land at Scale program aims to strengthen essential land governance components for men, women and youth to contribute to structural, just, sustainable, and inclusive change at scale in lower and middle income countries, regions, and landscapes. This program is supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency. Knowledge management is essential to the effective implementation of the Land at Scale program. It is conceived in a comprehensive and adaptive way that integrates documentation, learning, and sharing. Knowledge management means bringing in state-of-the-art insights to strengthen interventions, reaching out to make relevant knowledge available to the right people at the right time, and sharing lessons learned in the program with a wide audience. In this series of short videos, we explore three key aspects of the knowledge management program within Land at Scale. These are adaptive programming, South-South exchange, and monitoring and evaluation. Each of the video presents evidence and insights from experts working in the land governance sector. This video is focused on monitoring and evaluation and how it relates to knowledge management. Monitoring and evaluation is used to assess the performance of projects with the goal of improving current and future management of outputs, outcomes, and impacts. In this video, experts answer a range of questions that provide insights and their experiences. ILC has a combined M&E system, let's say. We measure impact mainly through our land tax initiative, and then we have our corporate monitoring and evaluation, in which we report mainly on changes in policies and practices. And in doing so, we balance both qualitative and quantitative information and use them both to tell our stories, analyze our results, and monitor them. In the past reunion, we have introduced our contribution analysis that we usually do on country-level initiatives, namely our national engagement strategies. So for initiatives that have an impact at country-level, let's say. And we do these. We have undertaken these to better map ILC's contribution to changes in policies and practices for people-centered land governance that is our goal. And we also do them to get this description that we find out through this analysis, recognized and verified by a wider audience that is usually the platform that undertakes the national engagement strategy. And in doing so, this analysis, basically, we present also lessons learned, as well as challenges, on ways to progress further. So as I said, we kind of balance both quantitative and qualitative descriptions of change. Because as we know, when it comes to advocacy policy change, numbers count, but they have to be counterbalanced by a description of those numbers. And that is exactly what we try to do. In terms, you definitely need a combination of quantitative and qualitative. For knowledge management, there are certain quantitative indicators that you can use as an entry point. But I would very much caution that they should be entry points only and not just taken as a measure by themselves. So put more positively, you need to make sure that those quantitative indicators are actually capturing your target audience. I think that is one issue. I think one of the challenges that we always faced is what level do you set for your quantitative indicators? I mean, you have certain reference points in communication success as the LAN portal knows better than anyone really, that you can have average figures that you can use as reference points. But I think it's very difficult to judge what sort of target you should be setting. I think that qualitative indicators are particularly important in terms of people's response, endorsement of the knowledge that you have been generating. It can be a challenge to set up that system. We had an M&E log where we would put in, we would archive every email that came in with an endorsement or a positive recommendation. But then we had to follow that up with surveys targeted at particularly important groups and stakeholders to ask them to respond about how useful they had found the knowledge generated. And one of the problems there actually is always people's limited capacity to respond given their other pressures. The scope of what we are doing is very complex in the sense that you cannot use one methodology to address the issue. You need a triangulation. You need to bring our mixed method. You need to be more quantitative and more qualitative. And it is really fascinating to see how qualitative informations make, bring out some news and an important revelation and finding out what we are doing. We measure perception, we measure level of participation, which gives you more narrative on how these numbers, like, for example, number of hectares, number of communities are developed, came to be just the number without the explanation behind where these numbers are from and how and what. It's not sufficient. It's not important to give you the full story of the reality happening on the ground. I've developed this methodology, let's say, that we call Contribution Analysis, in which we analyze what happens in a country or in a given initiative. And these Contribution Analysis were thought and were designed to have a reflection workshop with the platforms, with the actors of those platforms to learn from their achievements, but also on the challenges and to use those lessons learned for future planning. Unfortunately, since COVID hit, the platform has been mostly engaged in verifying the results that we have been seeing rather than really participating in these reflection workshops. So with this new strategy and with the new M&E strategy and system that is starting next year, we will further strengthen this cycle where we want to collaborate more with learning, more with communications. But we have also included knowledge management in this cycle because we see in our experience that the M&E information and data and also the analysis that comes with it is the starting point to finally then get a better communication to a wider audience on what ILC achieves, what the challenges were and so on, that, as I said, we go through learning and reflecting on those challenges and how to kind of improve in the future. But we also include now in these contribution analysis that are central to our system, let's say, we include knowledge management as part of the exercise in further examining what comes out and what is presented in the contribution analysis in which good practice emerged from them so that they can be further used in other learning exercises and exchanges between platforms, for example. It is part of our strategy and we are now developing an integrated approach so that it could be strongly integrated, monitoring and learning and knowledge development. We have the framework that has been developed, which unfortunately is difficult to share with you during this interview so you see the different components. And now we are in this next phase is to really integrate it. But since the tenure facility was still very young, organization-growing, we started piloting this in a hard-work manner and trying to gather some of the data, seeing how it can work. And then now it is the time now we are streamline and integrating it into the system. I tend to go back again to these contribution analysis because these are really our central, let's say, MNE work in which we really try to link those contribution analysis workshops, these reflection moments, two planning moments, which means that we have the first moment in which members together sit and reflect on the results they have achieved and also on the challenges they have faced and the setbacks and so on to use those reflections in further planning to adapt what they plan to what has been emerging from the past. Also, in general, these contribution analysis that are evaluations of what we do take in consideration longer time frames. So for example, in some cases, even the whole life of an initiative that can go up to 10 years. In doing these analysis, you clearly see that little setbacks can still be part of a successful story. So especially when it comes to policy influencing, making sure that those policies get implemented, it takes such a long time frame to actually see change happening that no setback is really a setback. It really starts with having a relationship of trust and a lot of transparency and continuous discussion. I think if project implementers feel that they can talk to the project supervisors from the funders side very openly about what is happening and can demonstrate that they're doing their utmost to implement the project effectively, then having that relationship of trust makes it possible to have a safe space, I think to talk about what is going wrong and what is not. And I think one way of really helping to set up that relationship and be very clear about expectations is having a solid reasonable period of time for the inception period. A low project is being punished for not being a target in the sense that tenure security is not an end goal. It is really important for us to understand this. That's why in some we talk about advancing tenure, it's a process and when you break it down as a process based indicators and look at what have been achieved within that two years towards tenure security, then we have a lot of information, a lot of data, a lot of best practice that you can package and knowledge product. She has been producing good practices and requesting good practices from its members from a long time. So when in M&E we do our analysis or our evaluations, we always use these good practices as part of the wealth of information that is necessary to understand what our members have been doing, country level or in their initiatives. So definitely these are always a source, these good practices from our members are always a source for information when it comes to our evaluations. We have collected more than 150 good practices that are part of a database that is available to everyone. The database of good practices aims at pulling together important contents that can inform members and other users of the work of our members and also inform people about what our members have done to overcome certain challenges. So the focus is on the tools, the processes and the methodologies that they have come up with and implemented to improve their situation at country level to overcome specific challenges and to achieve people-centered land governance while certain processes can be obstructed and afterwards replicated by others. They are often quite context specific and so it's important also to describe the context in which they were implemented. Very concrete example is that in legend we did an in-depth review of land tenure regularization at scale, so how to increase, improve tenure security at scale and we did a review of the UK government's programs to regularize land tenure and pulled out some really strong lessons from that about the operationalization of it, about the theory of change and about the importance of political economy analysis. And those lessons have been taken forward into the design of the technical assistance facility that the UK government is going to launch and the decision support unit that will accompany that which has a strong, obviously a strong knowledge management function and a strong M&E function. The lessons from that report, that review were disseminated amongst the range of donors through the donor working group on land and having that coordination mechanism and being able to direct learning to a group of funders who can use that then to discuss their own experiences I think is really crucial. Let me use Liberia where we the tenure facility conducted a pilot process there before the enactment of the land right law and during that pilot process all the knowledge products from that pilot process have been very instrumental in the enactment of the legal framework and it has been very useful now in the MEE process. For example, during the pilot the pilot helped to develop a staff identification guide which is now the foundation and the first step in the process of formalization of customary land right in Liberia. And this step is now really integrated in the Progen MEE process and how they report on how the different communities are organizing, self-organizing and they are self-following that guidelines in that self-identification protocol which was a product, a knowledge product from the tenure facility pilot and a knowledge product that the government also buy in and make it as a one of the legality framework for the implementation of the land right act.