Systems Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Toolkit for Food Systems
Practical guidance for navigating complexity and supporting transformation
A Toolkit for the Real World
This practitioner-focused toolkit helps teams apply systems thinking in real-world MEL practice—specifically within food systems. Building on the General Systems MEL guidance, it offers tools, prompts, and examples to support more adaptive, inclusive, and responsive learning.
Whether you’re working on a single project or managing a broader program or portfolio, this toolkit helps you make sense of complex change—and understand your initiative’s role in shaping it.
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What This Toolkit Offers
Seeing systems change, not just managing it
At the heart of this toolkit is the ability to look beyond isolated outcomes. It helps your initiative notice what's often hidden—emerging patterns, shifts in relationships, and changes in power dynamics. It’s about making sense of how transformation unfolds over time, and understanding where your interventions fit within that larger story (i.e., your contribution to systems change).
A grounded, responsive approach
Systems MEL is not an abstract theory. It offers a practical way for your project to navigate uncertainty, reflect on change as it emerges, and adapt to shifting realities. Think of it as a deeper, more connected way of doing the MEL work already in motion—only now, it’s more reflective, responsive, and aligned with how change actually happens.
Made for practitioners like you
This is a hands-on, practitioner-centered resource. It is intended to be used directly by teams and individuals. Each section offers tools, prompts, and real-world examples that support a wide range of applications—whether integrating systems thinking into an existing MEL framework or building a new approach from the ground up.
Photo: UNDP Somalia
What is Systems Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (Systems MEL)?
It's a way of tracking and learning from change in complex systems. It goes beyond measuring outputs to look at relationships, patterns, and feedback—helping initiatives learn, adapt, and contribute more effectively to long-term systems transformation.
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Why Food Systems Need Systems MEL
Food systems connect people, land, markets, institutions, and ecosystems—and they sit at the intersection of critical global challenges: climate change, inequality, nutrition, and rural livelihoods.They are not only about producing and distributing food—they also involve the social, economic, and political relationships that determine how food moves, who has access, who benefits, and how decisions are made.
Because of these interdependencies, food systems are not just complicated—they are complex: adaptive, dynamic, and often unpredictable. In complex systems, change is rarely linear, and solutions often emerge through iteration, learning, and feedback.
This complexity calls for approaches to monitoring, evaluation, and learning that can capture the full picture—how changes ripple across sectors, influence relationships, and shape long-term trajectories.
Photo: UNDP Cambodia
Systems MEL offers that lens. Rather than only asking whether something worked, it helps practitioners explore:
How
How change unfolds across domains such as equity, environment, and livelihoods.
What
What shifts are occurring in relationships, behaviors, and decision-making.
Where
Where feedback and learning are reshaping strategies, policies, and incentives.
Which
Which contributions are enabling transformation, rather than seeking isolated attribution.
Whether
Whether unintended consequences are signaling new dynamics that require a response.
It complements, rather than replaces, traditional MEL by introducing feedback loops, flexibility, and diverse perspectives—fostering learning from grassroots practice to national policy. In doing so, it strengthens the capacity for meaningful transformation in food systems, from siloed interventions to more adaptive, coordinated approaches, and from top-down decision-making to inclusive governance.
It also ensures persistent inequalities—such as unequal access to land, limited voice for workers, and gendered barriers in markets are not overlooked, and that progress is measured not only in yields or scale, but also in fairness, resilience, and coherence.
More:
What Are Food Systems and What is Food Systems Transformation?
What Makes Food Systems Complex?
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Why Traditional MEL Approaches Fall Short
Traditional MEL approaches often focus on tracking pre-defined outputs or isolated interventions. Yet challenges like land degradation, food insecurity, or inequitable diets rarely stem from a single cause. They emerge from the way different parts of the food system interact — how incentives, resources, and power flow through it.
When these relationships are misaligned, well-intended actions can create unintended consequences. Market signals that reward a few export crops can discourage diversity, depleting soils and narrowing diets. Policies made in isolation — across agriculture, trade, and nutrition — can work against each other. And when land and decision-making are concentrated, inequality and vulnerability deepen.
Because everything is connected, even small shifts can have far-reaching effects. Changing how schools purchase food, for instance, can open markets for smallholder farmers, improve children’s nutrition, and reshape roles within households.
Recognizing these interconnections allows MEL to move beyond counting activities — toward understanding how change unfolds across the system, and how learning can strengthen it as a whole.
Implemented by:
United Nations
Development Programme
FUNDED BY:
MEL 360 is part of the Systems, Monitoring, Learning and Evaluation initiative (SMLE) of UNDP funded by the Gates Foundation.
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