Tag: real-time data

With the rapidly growing field of monitoring and evaluation, there are many technology tools that are designed to help the many roles of M&E practitioners. The fastest growing area has been digital data collection, which currently uses mobile phones and portable GPS systems. Reporting has become easier with all the tools for data visualizations and data cleaning. There are also many research options with statistical software and programming languages for data entry, documentation, and analysis. In addition, real-time M&E tools let you do program and data management with real-time project updates. What we found in the course was that there are tech tools that integrate multiple aspects of M&E.

Here are several of the tools we discussed in the inaugural round of our Technology for M&E online class last fall, as crowdsourced by over 100 IT experts and M&E practitioners based in over 30 countries. In the next iteration of this course, we’ll be covering some of the latest tools including satellite imaging, remote sensors, and more.

What M&E technology tools do you use? How has your experience been with these tools listed? Are there great tech tools for M&E that we missed? Please share with us in the comments or tweet us @TechChange.

Interested in learning about these tools more in depth? Join us for our popular Tech for M&E online course that runs 14 September – 9 October.

For the first time, an international observation mission will utilize mobile devices and formhub for collecting real-time data from its observers.

I’m here in Egypt as part of the election observation mission with Democracy International, where 80 international observers are being sent to 23 governorates to witness the conduct of voting for the constitutional referendum. Each team was issued with two  mobile devices: A Nokia 105 cell phone and a Nexus 7 Tablet. While mobile phones have long been a staple of campaigns and observer missions, the mobile app is still fairly new — and not without skepticism. The Romney 2012 campaign in the US bragged about using tablets and Orca for mobile coordination, only to experience a complete meltdown on election day.

Screenshot from Formhug

Screenshot from formhub.org.

The tech is neat, but we’ll also have the hard-copy forms to report our findings in the event of interruptions or hardware failure. While formhub may be faster, more accurate, more informative, and lower risk than paper, when it comes to highly reliable and resilient methods for data collection, it’s still tough to beat paper.

For now, anyway.

 

There’s more to formhub than Egypt and elections! Below is a neat visualization of 1 million formhub submissions from around the world. Want to learn more? Check out our upcoming course on Mobiles for International Development.