Register for our June 13 meeting: How can AI support participatory MEL and sense making?

At the next meeting of the Natural Language Processing Community of Practice (NLP-CoP), Juan Carlos Munoz Mora will walk us through an AI-enabled MEL platform developed by the team at Universidad EAFIT in Colombia. This meeting is co-hosted by the NLP-CoP’s Sandbox Working Group.

We’ll convene on June 13, 9am Colombia time, 10am ET. Register now!

The platform supports monitoring, evaluation, and learning efforts for S2City, a multi-country initiative founded by the Botnar Foundation and led by Global Infrastructure Basel (GIB). This initiative aims to assist selected cities worldwide in implementing youth-led participatory interventions to enhance the safety and well-being of young people in urban environments. 

The EAFIT system draws together primary data from youth (blogs, audio, photos, video, social media) and secondary data (in the form of reports, work plans and other MEL inputs) from cities in the Philippines, Colombia, Ecuador and, Indonesia. It uses AI tools to help draw out conceptual dimensions of change according to the localization of program’s overall theory of change and its own learning framework (Evidence to Action) framework.

The project aims to put “MEL” in the hands of young people by helping them document and report change. Young people themselves do sensemaking along the way in an embedded process that transforms M&E from a heavy-duty, aggressive battleship to a low-key, invisible submarine by enabling young people to report on their own meaningful changes and to use the capabilities of large language models and generative AI to support with data collection, analysis, and reporting. 

Register now!

Register now to join us for this exciting deep dive where we’ll converse with Juan Carlos, researcher and lead of the architect team of the system, on how AI might help improve participatory MEL. Upon registration you’ll receive a Zoom link for accessing the meeting.

And if you haven’t already, find out more about joining the NLP Community of Practice convened by the MERL Tech Initiative! As well as gaining access to resources and events at the intersection of MERL and NLP, you can join a wide range of working groups covering everything from NLP in Africa to Social and Behaviour Change to Philanthropy in Emerging AI.