BACKGROUND
Origin story: Why a portfolio approach to learning in Nepal?
In 2017, as Nepal was still recovering from a decade-long civil war and devastating earthquakes, it embarked on a historic shift from a unitary to a federal system of governance.
Concurrently, an internal review of the UK’s then-Department for International Development—now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)—highlighted the need for the agency to continuously reassess its portfolio in response to Nepal’s rapidly evolving political landscape. It would do this by systematically applying learning and evidence-based course corrections.
Foreign aid delivery has traditionally been organized within narrow sectoral or programmatic silos, leaving gaps in evidence about the collective effectiveness of aid. Nepal’s move toward a devolved, federal structure made it even more urgent for development assistance to draw on evidence and lessons learned to design impactful, sustainable interventions.
The UK designed the Nepal Portfolio Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (PMEL) program to evaluate how its broader development portfolio was adapting to the country’s changes. PMEL would also strengthen strategic learning and foster greater portfolio coherence for FCDO Nepal to deliver stronger development impact.
WHAT WE'RE DOING
Portfolio learning in practice
From 2020-2025, PMEL helped FCDO Nepal cultivate a portfolio approach to aid delivery, building synergies across individual programs and strengthening their collective contribution to higher-level strategic goals.
As PMEL’s implementer, Abt Global Britain worked with senior leaders and wider program staff and partners to:
- Align program-level MEL, maximizing the aggregate and additive value of MEL data already collected by programs
- Synthesize evidence and create new knowledge products to respond to portfolio level questions by mining evidence and data from existing programs
- Support evidence uptake and learning by creating systems and processes for shared understanding and improved decision-making.
PMEL aligned its work with FCDO Nepal’s learning agenda and convened stakeholders to distil valuable insights from the portfolio. We acted as an extended learning arm for FCDO Nepal, generating evidence for portfolio management through:
- Co-creation of shared principles on key sectoral efforts of FCDO Nepal, such as Nepal’s transition to e-governance
- Shared understanding of ways of working, such as using different modalities of technical assistance to improve government systems
- Enhanced use of management information systems for navigating FCDO Nepal’s portfolio footprint across geographic and administrative boundaries, and enabling stronger coordination, communication, and coherence across programs
- Systematic integration of adaptive management into programming.
PMEL also helped establish ‘good enough’ evidence: insights that were both telling and timely, rather than waiting for perfect data that may be available too late for critical decisions. A dynamic approach grounded in continuous and collaborative interpretation kept the learning cycle and feedback loops short, efficient, and responsive to stakeholder needs.
Listen to Systems Practice in International Development podcast, a PMEL initiative implemented by Abt Global and funded by FCDO Nepal.
Through this podcast, Abt’s hosts Alexandra Nastase and Ankeeta Shreshta talk about systems practice to see what has and has not worked in practice. The episodes debunk complexities around systems thinking, portfolio approaches, adaptive management, and evidence use for impact.
IMPACT
Strengthening portfolio coherence and effectiveness
If there is one problem that PMEL was designed to solve, it was a ‘siloed’ approach to aid delivery. Its comprehensive view of FCDO Nepal’s portfolio—who is doing what, where, when, and in collaboration with which stakeholders—facilitated stronger coordination and coherence across projects, programs, and people, so they could leverage each other’s work. PMEL also examined delivery approaches across the portfolio, from how the UK Embassy engages with stakeholders to support local leadership, to how FCDO deploys technical assistance to bolster government systems.
This enabled PMEL to inject consistency into approaches to learning and adaptation. For example, we helped build a shared understanding of adaptive management by facilitating key discussions and offering tools that strengthen adaptive management in practice. These efforts improve programming effectiveness, with the ultimate goal of expanding impact.
PMEL Nepal painted the big picture, asking questions like, ‘Is the balance of portfolio support across the layers of government right?’ to enable portfolio dialogues. This innovation can change the ‘mental models’ that attach people to siloed ways of thinking and working.
WHY IT MATTERS
Adaptive management improves effectiveness
In the dynamic world of international development, an adaptive PMEL function responds to shifting donor priorities and organisational changes, supporting and reinforcing clients’ strategic agendas.
The PMEL experience shows that institutionalising a learning function is a sure way to prioritise collective portfolio-level learning and planning. FCDO is taking its model to other facilities across the world, including in Nigeria and Kenya.
Through patience, effective relationships, and constant and consistent presence, PMEL Nepal helped widen the focus from trees to the forest, from individual project siloes to the whole FCDO Nepal portfolio.
Project
Portfolio Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (PMEL) Nepal
Client
Portfolio Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (PMEL) Nepal