by Caitlin McQuilling

“Don’t automate a broken system”

Monitoring and evaluation is often the most difficult part of any development program.  It’s often an afterthought for implementers, too busy worrying about rolling out the immediate and the tangible to worry about how they’ll evaluate their work at some later stage.

It’s important that data is not something that’s just written down in a grid each month and never seen again.  The strongest programs are the ones in which ground level staff find their reporting useful in their daily work.  By making data helpful to ground level staff it makes their reporting in turn more accurate.

Even though RMF put a focus on our M&E from the beginning of our program, it has continued to be one of the biggest struggles in implementing our program on the ground.  As our program grows we are not only constantly assessing, analyzing and evaluating our data but also try to give the same level of analysis to the processes by which we collect data.

In this age where there seems to be a tech solution for everything, many development programs make the mistake of thinking that technology will be a “silver bullet” which will fix all of their challenges in the field.  The best advice we received from one of the technology experts we were consulting with when deciding which direction we should take our program was “don’t automate a broken system,” meaning that before introducing any new technology, an organization should make sure their fundamentals are solid.  As we moved forward with the planning of two innovative technology pilot programs for data collection integrating technology such as mobile phones or digital slates, we also needed to ensure that the fundamentals of our program are strong and that we understand and were honest about our strengths and weaknesses in data collection.

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