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Abstract COVID-19 has significantly disrupted progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals, creating new barriers to program implementation and evaluation due to restricted mobility and limited in-person interaction. This chapter examines innovative monitoring and evaluation approaches that prioritize local contexts as essential strategies for overcoming these challenges. Drawing on recent evaluation and research initiatives that adapted their methods during the pandemic, it emphasizes the value of grass-roots evaluation thinking, cross-learning, and scaling up local solutions to address regional needs. To engage communities hesitant to share concerns, evaluators employed projective techniques, such as contextual story discussions in which participants interpret or create endings. These indirect methods foster expression, address sensitive issues, and support the empowerment of vulnerable groups. Additional participatory approaches—remotely facilitated focus groups with local facilitators and video interviews with key informants—proved valuable but faced constraints, including technological access and the need for capacity building. The analysis, grounded in firsthand experience, explores these methodological adaptations, the challenges they pose, and the opportunities they present. It argues that future evaluation must be anchored in grass-roots perspectives while fostering collaboration among evaluators and practitioners globally. To meet development objectives in a post-COVID context, stakeholders must invest in partnerships, networks, experimentation, and innovation, both within countries and through international learning exchanges among actors with similar socio-cultural contexts. The chapter concludes that robust networks of local evaluators, capable of working across sectors, can accelerate the scale and pace of evaluation reforms needed to respond effectively to evolving global challenges.