International Care Ministries (ICM) – Philippines

How this story represents an international-local faith partnership in Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL): International Christian faith-based poverty alleviation organisation & partnerships with local pastors in Philippines.

International Care Ministries (ICM) is a Christian faith-based organisation that operates mostly in the Philippines. Its core strategic programme, ‘Transform,’ aims to alleviate poverty by focusing on values, health, livelihood, and education.

ICM values both research and MEAL and aims for its operations to be data driven. The organisation uses multiple monitoring points, data sets, and usually surveys around 40,000 households a year, with a team of six full-time researchers spending six months of the year undertaking field-based surveying. However, the spread of the coronavirus cut off the organisation’s usual data streams in February and March 2020, which effectively shut down the  organisation’s conventional MEAL operations. ICM saw a need for reliable data coming from the communities they work with, so they set up a representative sentinel project with the aim of getting an immediate sense of community needs and regular up-to-date information during the crisis.

Working with faith leaders provided the ICM MEAL team with insights into the situation on the ground, which they would otherwise have struggled to collate.

Click here for the Compendium of Good Practices on Conducting MEAL and Faith