ReliefWeb

A few years ago, a well-known relief and development organization published a refreshingly honest review of all the mistakes its teams had made when collecting and analysing monitoring and evaluation (M&E) data. When reading the report, I recognized the same mistakes I had seen in many other organizations. These mistakes mattered: they resulted in situations where after years of hard work, the organizations were unable to prove what their efforts (and donor funding) had actually achieved. It made me wonder: since we all tackle the same global problems and use the same indicators to measure our results, should we not also use the same, well-tested means of obtaining the required data?

Let us take the example of assessing the prevalence of diarrhoea, a leading cause of child mortality. Should our enumerators ask whether the child currently suffers from diarrhoea? Or whether the child had diarrhoea in the past week – or the past month? And what does diarrhoea actually mean? Is it any loose stool? Oh, but what about babies whose stool is naturally soft? Moreover, how does seasonality shape the data we get? While such information might seem like unimportant detail, it actually determines whether we can rely on our M&E surveys or not.

The Most Comprehensive Guidance to Date

The relief and development world is flooded with thousands of manuals and many of them provide useful guidance on getting the data we need. The downside is that many aid workers often do not have the time or energy to be seeking out and reading hundreds of pages of guidance. People frequently resort to what seems easiest: asking for information in the way they feel is best. This sometimes works, but as M&E specialist, Justin Lyle, comments: “It can also ruin your project’s M&E system”. So the question is: how can we help aid workers to get data they can rely on?

In early 2016, a group of technical and M&E specialists at the Czech INGO People in Need (PIN) started working on a new tool. “We wanted to come up with a product that would help the staff of different organizations to make their M&E easier and of a better quality”, explains Petra Humlová, PIN’s Senior M&E Advisor. A year later, PIN launched www.indikit.net, a practical on-line guide helping relief and development practitioners to select the right indicators and collect the required data to the highest quality. IndiKit covers hundreds of indicators from the food security, nutrition, WASH, health, education, DRR and other sectors. “What I like most is how user-friendly IndiKit is – with two to three clicks you get all the guidance you need. It saves me lots of time”, says Kate Holland from PIN’s Alliance2015 partner ACTED, one of the first users of IndiKit.

An Open Source That Everyone Can Improve

Developing such a comprehensive guide was not easy – it required reviewing hundreds of existing resources, collecting lessons from the field, and writing up proven guidance while consulting technical and M&E experts from UN Global Clusters, academia and aid agencies, including WFP, ACF, Concern Worldwide, ACTED and others. PIN’s priority has been to ensure that IndiKit content is methodologically correct and in line with the existing standards and guidance set by Sphere, global clusters, WHO, FAO and others. At the same time, following Wikipedia’s example, IndiKit encourages its users to draw on their own M&E experience to propose new content and improve the existing guidance. “We believe that the more people and organizations contribute to developing the scope and quality of IndiKit’s content, the better the service IndiKit will provide”, explains Petra Humlová IndiKit’s longer-term vision. Are you interested to know more? Check out IndiKit’s guidance and Frequently Asked Questions.

About the author

Petr Schmied works for PIN on strategy and quality development. He initiated and led the development of IndiKit. Drawing on his twelve years of experience in the sector, he focuses on finding systemic solutions to increasing the quality of relief and development programming. He holds an MA in Development and Emergency Practice from Oxford Brookes University.