More Tech Salons About monitoring and evaluation
-
Most government funded international development programs start with a Request for Proposal (RFP) that has to follow strict government procurement processes. These systems are designed to protect taxpayer money from waste and fraud and generate very detailed proposals. However, this very focus on risk aversion could actually be increasing the risk that humanitarian relief programing,…
-
The inaugural South African Technology Salon How Can Big Data Solve South Africa’s Biggest Challenges?, we discussed the potential of Big Data in contributing to the achievement of development objectives in South Africa and the region. Participating in the discussion was a range of public sector M&E officials, private and not-for-profit organisations, donors and programme…
-
One thread in this year’s excellent MERL Tech conference was the critical questions on data use: How do we balance project needs with policy requirements? How does that affect data collection, structure, and cleaning? Can we still incentivize both at an organizational level? Ultimately: are we able to generate results data that is usable and…
-
Traditional development evaluation has been characterized as ‘backward looking’ rather than forward looking and too focused on proving over improving. Some believe applying an ‘agile’ approach in development would be more useful — the assumption being that if you design a program properly and iterate rapidly and constantly based on user feedback and data analytics, you are more likely…
-
The NYC Technology Salon on February 28th examined the connection between bigger, better data and resilience. We held morning and afternoon Salons due to the high response rate for the topic. Jake Porway, DataKind; Emmanuel Letouzé, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative; and Elizabeth Eagen, Open Society Foundations; were our lead discussants for the morning. Max Shron, Data…
-
33,000 stores, 61 years of business, and more than 1 billion served. Can you guess which organization these numbers are associated with? McDonald’s. Imagine if development organizations had these kinds of statistics. Imagine if they could track results to this degree. Would programs save money? Be more efficient? What would it take to harness data…
-
According to the latest GSMA statistics, nearly 50% of people own a mobile phone in the developing world and almost 70% have access to mobile phones. With mobile access increasing daily, opportunities to use mobiles in development initiatives continue to grow and expand. The area of Mobiles for Development (M4D) has attracted investment from all…
-
At the October Technology Salon NYC, we focused on ways that ICTs can be used for qualitative monitoring and evaluation (M&E) efforts that aim to listen better to those who are participating in development programs. Our lead discussants were: John Hecklinger, Global Giving; Ian Thorpe, UNDOC and Beyond 2015 Campaign; and Emily Jacobi, Digital Democracy….
-
New technologies are changing the nature of monitoring and evaluation, as discussed in our previous Salon on the use of ICTs in M&E. However, the use of new technologies in M&E efforts can seem daunting or irrelevant to those working in low resource settings, especially if there is little experience or low existing capacity with…
-
New technologies are opening up all kinds of possibilities for improving monitoring and evaluation. From on-going feedback and crowd-sourced input to more structured digital data collection, to access to large data sets and improved data visualization, the field is changing quickly.
-
One of the sad truths that emerged at the Technology Salon on ICTs and M&E was that failure in development is rarely about the project performance, but about winning the next contract. This means that monitoring and evaluation is less about tracking and improving progress towards social change and more about weaving an advertising pitch….
-
Last month, the M&E for ICT4D Technology Salon noted that we lacked quality tools to measure outcomes. We all intuitively know that ICT could be the basis for great M&E tools, but what about taking that feeling into action?
-
No one ever fails in ICT4D. Isn’t that amazing! Technologies come and go quickly – bye, bye PDA’s, Windows Vista, and soon Nokia – yet in ICT4D, each project has impact and we never fail. We just have lessons learned. In fact, can you name a single technology program that has publicly stated that it…
-
Everyone talks about measurement and evaluation (M&E) like it matters. Yet, few of us do it well or even at all with ICT projects. So why should we measure and evaluate? How can we go about it? And what are the industry best practices, applied to the uniqueness of ICT? Our goal is to explore…
-
The Girls and ICT Technology Salon was a great opportunity to get an amazing group of thinkers and do-ers in the same room to debate around a particular topic. I’m Linda Raftree, Plan International West Africa Regional Office, Advisor for New Technology and Social Media. I was honored to lead 20+ people in a conversation…