Alethea is a senior program manager at Results for Development, where she leads monitoring, evaluation and learning within the Innovation team. She is also a specialist in gender equity, disability and social inclusion (GEDSI), and helps ensure a comprehensive inclusion lens throughout the Innovation team’s work. Collectively, she works to ensure that innovative approaches bring about equitable impact and are measured and learned from in ways that benefit the change agents involved and the wider ecosystems.

She has worked as a researcher, grant manager and technical expert on public health and gender equality, often with a focus on sexual and reproductive health. She has been a thought leader on menstrual health and has provided expert advice to multiple stakeholders — including UNFPA, ActionAid Malawi, Plan International, AmplifyChange and the Aga Khan Foundation — shaping policy and generating direct impact. For example, she recently guided the Aga Khan Foundation in Uganda to pilot and scale a first-of-its-kind menstrual cup project that produced tangible quantitative uptake results as well as rich qualitative insights. Throughout her work, Alethea has focused on bridging the gap between research and implementation, emphasizing how to capture actionable insights that drive tangible changes responding directly to localized problems.

Before joining R4D, she worked as an independent consultant, providing technical advice on monitoring, evaluation and learning to multiple INGOs and international development actors, including UK Aid Match. From 2020 to 2024, she was a senior technical expert in gender and social inclusion at MannionDaniels, serving on the senior management team. Her responsibilities included working directly with donors such as FCDO, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, UNFPA and cross-donor partnerships such as the Global Evidence in Education Advisory Panel to ensure quality results and impact measurement within education, health and climate programming.

Alethea holds a master’s degree in public health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a master’s degree in Middle East studies from the University of Oxford, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Exeter.

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This white paper, “Measurement and Learning for Catalytic Programs in the Development and Humanitarian Sectors” defines catalytic impact as the sustainable improvements in people’s lives that result from systems change or replication at scale, rather than from direct interventions. It presents a practical framework for how organizations can measure, learn from, and strengthen these types of indirect, system-level effects.

What’s Inside

The paper, co-authored by individuals from R4D, CARE, and PSI, distills learning from two global convenings of organizations that fund, deliver, and evaluate catalytic programs and draws lessons from four case studies across health, housing, and agriculture. It introduces five guiding principles for measurement and learning in catalytic work:

• Select right-fit, credible, mixed methods that balance rigor with feasibility.
• Adopt locally owned and user-centered approaches that reflect participants’ priorities.
• Generate evidence for a defined purpose and use, tailored to decision-making needs.
• Approach measurement with a learning focus to support adaptation and improvement.
• Be iterative, innovative, and adaptive in methods, analysis, and use of data over time.

Why It Matters

Catalytic programs seek to influence complex systems through partnerships, scaling, and innovation. Traditional monitoring and evaluation methods are not designed to capture these indirect, long-term effects. This white paper calls for a shift toward adaptive, learning-oriented measurement practices that can illuminate how catalytic change unfolds and how organizations can better contribute to lasting, locally led impact.

Key Recommendations

To advance measurement and learning for catalytic programs, the paper offers targeted recommendations for implementers, donors, and the broader catalytic work community, emphasizing the need for organizational buy-in, realistic budgeting for measurement, investment in innovative approaches, and the creation of a shared community of practice.

Explore the full paper in the download link above.

Author Contact Information

• Katie Bowman – kbowman@r4d.org
• Seth McGovern – smcgovern@psi.org
• Caitlin Shannon – cataspencer@gmail.com (former CARE)

Suggested Citation:

Bowman, Katie; McGovern, Seth; Shannon, Caitlin. (2025). A White Paper on Measurement and Learning for Catalytic Programs in the Development and Humanitarian Sectors. CARE, PSI, R4D.

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Dr. López Hernández is a senior program officer at Results for Development, where she supports the implementation of the Frequent Assessments and Systems Tools for Resilience (FASTR) initiative, a Global Financing Facility effort focused on improving the generation and use of real-time data for decision-making. Her work includes health facility data pipeline development, country analytics, technical facilitation in English and French, and coordination across multisector partners.

She has led or contributed to analytic and policy work on road safety, health system performance and gender equity. She was a key contributor to multi-country publications on future health spending in Latin America and supported the development of technical tools for analyzing DHIS2 and health facility data. Her social network analysis on women in global health has informed leadership development programs around the world.

Before joining R4D, Dr. López Hernández was a consultant at the World Bank’s Global Financing Facility, where she supported analytics development for the FASTR initiative. She previously held consulting roles with the World Bank Haiti team and the Inter-American Development Bank, and led research on road safety governance and coalition building at the Bloomberg Initiative for Global Road Safety. She has worked in more than 12 countries, including Guinea, Ghana, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Vietnam, Mexico and Brazil.

Dr. López Hernández is a Fulbright García-Robles scholar, a member of the Delta Omega Honorary Society in Public Health, and part of the Ruth Rice Puffer Fund Scholars Network at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

She holds a doctorate and a Master of Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a medical degree from UNAM in Mexico. She also completed a specialization in gender, sexuality and law at CIDE. She speaks Spanish (native), English (full professional) and French (advanced), and is proficient in Stata, R, NVivo and Kumu.

Publications

• The Lancet: Future Health Expenditures in Latin America and the Caribbean (2025) 
• BMJ Open: Digital job-aid evaluation in Burkina Faso
• Annals of Global Health: Women in Global Health Network Study  

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Dr. Bear has contributed to global market shaping and scale-up efforts since the early 2000s, beginning with GAVI’s PneumoADIP and the Hib Initiative, where she co-led the country support mechanism, providing technical assistance to Ministries of Health for vaccine rollout and impact evaluation. At USAID (2009–2015), she led the development of flagship U.S. Government health initiatives — including the Global Health Initiative, Ending Preventable Child and Maternal Deaths Action Plan, and the Global Health Security Agenda. While based in Bangladesh and Mali, she oversaw catalytic investments in cold chain systems, digital health, health workforce, and governance. She collaborated closely with ministries to co-design frameworks for scaling high-impact interventions as part of national health sector strategies.

From 2016 to 2019, Dr. Bear led strategic and evaluative work that shaped major global health investments. She revised USAID’s maternal and child health investment frameworks to align with the SDGs, evaluated its flagship maternal and child health program, and designed a $1B successor strategy. She also led evaluation of the $3.5B Feed the Future nutrition portfolio, providing evidence that informed its Congressional reauthorization. Her advisory work includes digital health evaluations, such as a telecom-based health insurance product in Bangladesh that informed regional scale-up strategies. From 2019 to 2024, she led global portfolios managing integrated development programs across 25–45 countries, overseeing teams of 500–1,650 staff.

Dr. Bear holds degrees in social policy (BS, Northwestern) and public health (MPH, DrPH, Johns Hopkins). She has lived and worked for over a decade in Burkina Faso, Mali, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Palestine. She is fluent in French (professional) and English (native), and currently resides in Baltimore, Maryland.

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R4D’s Evaluation and Adaptive Learning practice recently used MSC as part of a learning engagement with the USAID-funded Illuminating New Solutions and Programmatic Innovations for Resilient Spaces (INSPIRES) program. The team’s evaluation and learning activities with INSPIRES included assessing the implementation and outcomes of PartnersGlobal’s ResiliencyPlus (R+) Framework, a 12-month capacity strengthening intervention that provides support for civil society organizations (CSOs) to improve their organizational resilience. Through R+, CSOs complete the Resilient Organization in Changing Civic Space (ROCCS) assessment to help identify their organizational strengths and vulnerabilities and then work with a team of coaches to design and implement strategies to address those vulnerabilities.

By using MSC to assess the R+ program, we aimed to gain a deeper understanding of what changes program stakeholders perceived as most important for improved organizational resilience and to draw out lessons to strengthen future programming in pursuit of those changes. Our MSC process (shown below) had multiple steps and was iterative in nature, centering on its participant-driven approach.

In this blog, we highlight three key decision points we wrestled with in our application of Most Significant Change and what we learned in the process, which we share in more detail in this learning brief.

1. Is MSC a good fit for our evaluation and learning needs?

MSC is not always appropriate for evaluating a given program – and deciding whether to use it should be a collective decision among program stakeholders. After quite a bit of reflection with PartnersGlobal (the program implementer for R+) and USAID (the R+ program’s funder), we ultimately decided it was the right fit for our evaluation and learning needs due to the following enabling conditions:

Our R4D evaluation team had already been serving as a learning partner for PartnersGlobal and the R+ program for a few years, and we still planned to work together for a few more years to come under INSPIRES. Thus, we had the time and relationships with key stakeholders to establish buy-in and tailor the method to their needs.

Because MSC is a highly participatory method that requires time and input from many different stakeholders, having their buy-in from the start is key. Evaluators also need to have the flexibility, capacity and time to tailor the multi-step MSC process to the program, build in the various components, and lead the execution.

Through INSPIRES, we acknowledged the difficulty of conceptualizing and measuring organizational resilience as an outcome, especially across diverse and rapidly changing civil society contexts. We wanted to use a method that could be helpful in evaluating a program like R+ with complex, hard-to-predict outcomes.

MSC is most valuable when evaluating programs in complex settings or with complex outcomes. It is most useful when program outcomes are hard to predict with certainty, when there may be disagreement on which outcomes are the most important, or when outcomes are expected to vary widely.

We recognize that MSC is not designed to provide comprehensive results about the changes a program elicits or to identify the most typical change, but rather to tease out the most significant, unexpected, diverse, indirect or intangible changes. We decided to use MSC as only one of several evaluation methods to facilitate learning among program stakeholders, so we were comfortable with the fact that it wouldn’t provide comprehensive results.

While MSC can be applied in a rigorous way in which we can triangulate responses across stakeholders and validate outcomes, it is not typically used as a stand-alone method.

2. Who should write the significant change stories we collect?

There are a variety of ways in which significant change stories can be collected. Program implementers working closely with program participants could informally document stories that come up over the course of the program. External evaluators could collect stories of change via structured interviews or focus group discussions. Or program participants could write their own stories.

We combined a few of these approaches. We decided to first collect stories directly from program participants using a simple and open-ended story collection template that asked participants to respond to three key questions about changes aligned to a set of pre-defined themes of changes (also known as Domains of Change) that may be expected to occur from the R+ program.

1. Please describe the change in 1-2 sentences. What happened?
2. Please describe the significance of this change in 1-2 sentences. Why was this change significant to you and/or your organization?
3. Please describe R+’s contribution to this change in 1-2 sentences. How and why do you think R+ helped you/your organization achieve this change, if at all?

We encouraged CSOs to have multiple staff contribute to these stories to enable participants at different levels of an organization to share their perspectives. Organization staff also had the option to send us written or verbal stories (e.g., WhatsApp voice messages) in their language of choice. Offering options for how organizations could share their story was particularly valuable for ensuring we received the storyteller’s genuine perspective! Most organizations ended up sharing stories in written form — although there were a few who chose to share verbally — and nearly half shared their story in a language other than English.

By leaving the initial story crafting process in the hands of program participants, they had the freedom to respond in their original voice, interpret the Domains of Change as they saw fit, and take the time and space to reflect on program experiences and outcomes without the pressure of a formal interview.

But because we were using MSC for evaluation purposes, rigor was still important. Following initial story collection, we then verified the reported stories through document collection, interviews and surveys with program implementers. This verification process enabled us to triangulate reported changes and outcomes across different program stakeholders, develop a more nuanced understanding of participants’ experiences, and standardize the stories for discussion — all while maintaining as much of participants’ voice as possible.

Story verification is important but requires a decent amount of tracking people down. Build in ample time for this in your workplan and establish guidelines upfront for if/when you might drop stories that can’t be validated (e.g. because stakeholders didn’t agree on what happened or someone never responded to you for an interview).

3. What do I do with all these significant change stories?

Arguably the most important part of MSC is what happens after stories have been collected, as this is where the greatest opportunity for program learning lies.

The first step was to facilitate a collaborative discussion on the final set of stories, with the goal of reaching consensus on which stories of change were most significant within each Domain of Change. Since R4D’s learning support through MSC was intended to guide future decisions about the design and implementation of R+ programming, we decided to engage directly with the people who would be making those decisions — the PartnersGlobal implementing team and the R+ coaching team. And they each brought a different and important perspective on the program. PartnersGlobal had a bird’s-eye view of programming across multiple countries and cohorts of CSOs, while coaches brought specific contextual knowledge and experience working closely with CSO program participants.

Facilitating story selection both within and across these two groups of stakeholders proved crucial as each brought their own unique biases, value judgements and reflections on what types of change were most significant in the context of the program’s overall intended impact and implications of that for future programming.

Some of the key program learnings and recommendations that emerged out of this discussion included:

1. Change in awareness or mindset was a valid outcome unto itself.
2. It was not yet clear whether organizations should aim to use the R+ process to build on their strengths or address their greatest vulnerabilities. Both strategies proved valuable depending on the organization’s specific context.
3. PartnersGlobal should continue to explore opportunities to provide R+ support to both smaller, nascent organizations as well as those that are more well-established. Both derived value and were able to improve their organizational resilience through the program.

One additional reflection that surfaced during the story selection process was that all stories are significant in some way. As one R+ coach explained, “Considering cultural context, it’s hard to place value on certain changes over others. What is significant to one organization may be different from another.” As such, we decided to share all stories (anonymized and with consent) as well as subsequent learnings and recommendations with all program stakeholders, including USAID and the CSOs themselves. We did this through various touch points, including participatory learning sessions and development of an external learning brief.

This additional layer of partner engagement and process documentation does require time; however, it helps ensure the MSC process meaningfully contributes to program adaptation and that all stakeholders understand the connection between the stories they shared and how that data was used.

Looking forward

Whether you are new to MSC or a seasoned expert, we hope the experiences from our process are useful. This is how we applied MSC to fit our partners’ learning needs, but there are endless ways to adapt this flexible and iterative methodology – and MSC is just one tool in a larger toolbox of evaluation and adaptive learning methods. To see what other approaches are in our toolbox, check out our other blogs here.

Image credit: All illustrations in this blog post come from Rick Davies’ and Jess Dart’s The ‘Most Significant Change’ (MSC) Technique: A guide to its use.

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