While leadership often brings to mind advocacy campaigns, community action or policy influence, it is also found behind the scenes.
It is found in the systems, evidence and learning that help strengthen WAGGGS and the global Movement.
In this edition, we speak with WAGGGS’ organisational Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) team about the role of MEL in helping us understand our impact, improve our programmes and make better decisions. From developing WAGGGS’ first organisational Theory of Change (ToC) to embedding meaningful youth participation in our work , the team shares how evidence, reflection and collaboration are helping build a more connected, accountable and impact-driven WAGGGS.
“Evidence is one of our greatest enablers of change. By combining robust data with the lived experiences of girls and young women, we can better understand our impact, continuously improve our work and ensure that every decision we make brings us closer to our vision of an equal world where all girls can thrive.”
Ghadie Elhelaly, MEL Manager, WAGGGS
- What does Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) mean for WAGGGS?
As a volunteer-led Movement empowering girls and young women across 154 countries, WAGGGS leverages MEL as a strategic driver to ensure our data directly represents the active leadership and lived experiences of girls and young women around the world. By mapping our progress through monitoring, reflecting on our impact, and guiding our way forward through learning, we transform daily ground-level realities into strategic, evidence-based action. Grounded in the WAGGGS value of a reflective leadership mindset, this framework keeps the global team directly accountable to our membership and rapidly adaptable to the changing needs of the Movement. To capture the true depth of our impact across the Movement, our approach balances robust regional and global metrics with living insights like personal stories of change, actively building meaningful connections between them.
Driven by our commitment to high-impact numbers, we focus strictly on purposeful evidence that helps us understand the actual difference we make. By combining these targeted statistics with real-life testimonies in close to real-time, we build a credible, holistic, and deeply human picture of WAGGGS’ global impact that empowers girls, volunteers, and staff to make the best decisions on the ground.
2. Why is a shared centralised organisational MEL framework crucial now?
Over the past few years, the WAGGGS global team has systematically strengthened its organisational MEL function to bridge the gap between team-level actions and our long-term organisational goals. This strategic shift addresses three vital needs for the whole Movement:
- From fragmented to unified data: We are combining isolated project data into a single shared system. Connecting these separate pieces of information allows us to spot trends and see a clearer, connected picture of realities, successes, and challenges across our Member Organisations, helping us provide better targeted support.
- Demonstrating our global value: Bringing our data together allows us to present a holistic narrative of our impact. By proving how global investment translates into powerful outcomes, we build stronger partnerships that secure sustainable resources to strengthen and support the wider Movement directly.
- Driving two- way accountability: We establish a rigorous standard of transparency that goes both ways- we remain fully accountable to our donors by providing how their funding is spent, while staying equally accountable to our Members by ensuring our global resources answer the actual evolving needs of our Member Organisations.
3. What is the new organisational Theory of Change (ToC), and why did the team develop it?
Measuring social change and girls’ empowerment is inherently complex. Unlike standard performance metrics, tracking shifts in confidence, leadership, global citizenship and advocacy requires a more sophisticated framework.
To navigate this complexity, the global team co-created a new organisational ToC with girls, young women and Member Organisations. Officially launched at the 39th WAGGGS World Conference in June 2026, the ToC serves as a clear strategic roadmap that connects our everyday activities directly to our long-term organisational goals.
Acting as a shared compass, the ToC ensures all of our global operations are unified and moving in the exact same direction, keeping our collective efforts strictly focused on what matters most for the realisation of our vision for the Movement.
4. How will this ToC guide the WAGGGS team’s work moving forward, and what does it mean for the Movement and external partners?
The ToC is our blueprint for the future. It actively shapes how we work every day by helping us focus on four key areas.
- Staying true to our shared vision: Compass 2032
The ToC serves as a shared compass that keeps our long-term goals at the centre of everything we do, helping the team contribute to our Compass 2032 vision of an equal world where all girls can thrive. By mapping a clear pathway to change, it bridges our long-term aspirations with day-to-day delivery, ensuring our priorities remain grounded in the realities and needs of girls and young women.
- Investing where it matters most
The ToC connects our strategic ambitions with operational reality, enabling us to identify where our efforts will have the greatest impact. This ensures that donors’ investments, together with the valuable time of our staff and volunteers, are directed where they can create the greatest sustainable change.
- Making informed decisions
Guided by a clear understanding of our pathways to impact, the team uses real-time evidence to make informed strategic decisions. This approach enables us to capture learning, respond to challenges and adapt quickly to remain on track to achieve our objectives for the Movement.
- Measuring impact
WAGGGS has a long history of collecting valuable evidence across our programmes and initiatives. The ToC transforms how we use this information by moving away from isolated pockets of data and providing a framework that brings together evidence from across the organisation into one coherent story of long-term global impact.
5. As a youth and volunteer-led Movement, how do we practise meaningful youth participation in MEL?
As a girl-led Movement, we believe that research, evaluation and learning should be conducted with girls and young women, not simply about them. We use our MEL processes as a platform for girls and young women to shape decisions, identify priorities and co-design solutions.
We bring this commitment to life through three practical approaches.
- Girls as co-designers
We develop our frameworks with girls and young women. During the development of our organisational ToC, for example, we worked directly with girls and young women to understand their realities, aspirations and challenges. They identified the changes needed within the Movement and beyond for girls to thrive, and these insights formed the foundation of our pathways to change.
- Girls as local young evaluators
We have built the capacity of young volunteers as Most Significant Change (MSC) Champions, placing them at the heart of our qualitative evaluation processes. This initiative equips young women with the skills to lead the collection and analysis of stories of change, enabling them to measure impact through their own perspectives. By empowering them to interpret real-life stories of transformation, we create meaningful leadership opportunities while ensuring our evaluation reflects the true depth of change across the Movement.
- Girls as change story Panellists
We bring young volunteers directly into our regional and global selection panels to analyse and interpret our data. Our next step is to recruit regional volunteers to serve on these MSC panels, allowing them to engage in story selection that best demonstrates progress. We use simple, hands-on ways to review findings collectively, ensuring that the decisions about what success looks like are made by our Members. Most importantly, we always share these final choices back with the girls on the ground, letting them see exactly how their voices shape our global actions.
6. Looking ahead, how can we strengthen meaningful youth participation in MEL at local, regional and global levels?
We are actively exploring ways to strengthen meaningful youth participation across every level of our work. Our roadmap includes expanding participatory approaches to data collection, building a larger network of youth MEL champions and directly involving young people in analysing and interpreting research findings.
7. How can external partners, donors and the wider Movement support WAGGGS’ MEL journey?
Building a connected, evidence-driven and youth-centred MEL function is a collective effort. Our partners and the wider Movement can support this journey in three ways:
- Donors can invest directly in core MEL systems and volunteer capacity. Embedding dedicated MEL funding within programmes will enable us to strengthen the capacity of young volunteers, support field research and invest in innovative approaches to data collection and impact measurement.
- Member Organisations can contribute by actively participating in data collection and sharing honest, ground-level insights, enabling us to learn collectively and continuously improve the support we provide across the Movement.
- Volunteers are at the heart of our evidence. We invite passionate young people and adult volunteers to take on local MEL roles, helping collect stories, support data collection and interpret findings within their own communities and contexts.
At WAGGGS, MEL is about understanding what works, learning from experience and ensuring that girls and young women remain at the heart of every decision we make. By combining robust evidence with lived experience, and by embedding meaningful youth participation throughout our MEL journey, we are building a stronger, more connected and more accountable Movement.
As we continue to strengthen our organisational MEL function and put our Theory of Change into practice, we look forward to working alongside Member Organisations, volunteers, donors and partners to generate meaningful insights, demonstrate our collective impact and create even more opportunities for every girl to thrive.