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Culture and its influence on NGO project design and implementation
"Project staff do not need to work against culture. In fact, project staff should consider culture a strategic element to drive change." By Eric Warui and Philipp Marbach An NGO project should generate change within a particular target community. However, cultural...
Digital data capture systems for NGO monitoring and evaluation
"NGO monitoring and evaluation should reveal where change is happening, how it is happening and to what degree... Without quality, timely data to inform decision-making, monitoring processes can easily turn into clerical tasks performed for compliance’s sake. This is...
Why participatory evaluation is crucial to accountability
"NGO monitoring and evaluation processes are not neutral. They can work to maintain or challenge traditional power hierarchies ... Project managers must consider how the evaluation methods they use could perpetuate unequal power dynamics." There are lots of buzzwords...
Indicators: What are they and how do you recognise a good one?
"In 2020, Arqaam pored through thousands of indicators in its efforts to develop the Logframe Lab tool, a web application that helps organisations build their project’s logframe. Logframe Lab’s algorithms match a project idea with the most relevant metrics, drawing...
Why Informed Consent Matters in International Cooperation
"Questions can delve into people’s sexual reproductive health and activity, their income, family issues, and other sensitive topics. Hardly anyone thinks to themselves, “Would I give this info to a stranger knocking at my door?”" Nowadays, it’s easier than ever for...
How NGOs Can Safely and Securely Collect and Store Data
Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) working in the development and humanitarian aid sectors want to be sure their projects are making an impact. In order to track these impacts, NGOs rely on data collected through a variety of methods. By ‘data’, we mean everything...
Logframes: Flawed, but Necessary Tools
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms.”[1] As others have written before, logical framework approaches (LFAs) – aka, logframes – are often an annoyance. They are something that the ‘donor’ wants, and they serve as a...
What the Monitoring & Evaluation Industry Has Learned From COVID-19 So Far – TolaData Guest Post
"The pandemic’s social and economic impacts will be disproportionately felt by women and girls in the long-term. Women are already experiencing worse impacts from lay-offs, school closures, increased gender-based violence, increased caregiving expectations, and less...
What is the Gender Data Gap, and What Can We Do About It?
"When we don't have data, then we make assumptions. These assumptions typically revolve around a generic white man of 80kg. This can be dangerous in so many ways." The following blog post uses information from the work of Caroline Criado Perez and her book 'Invisible...
How Our Free Monitoring and Evaluation Training Helps Small NGOs
'Even though they often have the best contextual knowledge for their area of operations, grassroots and small local organisations frequently face several challenges that their bigger or international counterparts do not face when it comes to receiving outside...
Why is Monitoring and Evaluation Important for NGOs?
'it’s important to understand how...funds are being used, what outcomes are resulting from these programmes, and the impacts of the programmes for stakeholders.' According to the Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2019, published by Development Initiatives,...