Earlier this month I attended the African Evaluators’ Conference (AfrEA) in Cameroon as part of the Technology and Evaluation stream organized by Pact with financial support from The Rockefeller Foundation’s Evaluation Office and The MasterCard Foundation.
A first post about ICTs and M&E at the Afrea Conference went into some of the deliberations around using or not using ICTs and how we can learn and share more as institutions and evaluators. I’ve written previously about barriers and challenges with using ICTs in M&E of international development programs (see the list of posts at the bottom of this one). Many of these same conversations came up at AfrEA, so I won’t write about these again here. What I did want to capture and share were a few interesting design and implementation thoughts from the various ICT and M&E sessions. Here goes:
1) Asking questions via ICT may lead to more honest answers. Some populations are still not familiar with smart phones and tablets and this makes some people shy and quiet, yet it makes others more curious and animated to participate. Some people worry that mobiles, laptops and tablet create distance between the enumerator and the person participating in a survey. On the other hand, I’m hearing more and more examples of cases where using ICTs for surveying actually allow for a greater sense of personal privacy and more honest answers. I first heard about this several years ago with relation to children and youth in the US and Canada seeking psychological or reproductive health counseling. They seemed to feel more comfortable asking questions about sensitive issues via online chats (as opposed to asking a counselor or doctor face-to-face) because they felt anonymous. This same is true for telephone inquiries.
In the case of evaluations, someone suggested that rather than a mobile or tablet creating distance, a device can actually create an opportunity for privacy. For example, if a sensitive question comes up in a survey, an enumerator can hand the person being interviewed the mobile phone and look away when they provide their answer and hit enter, in the same way that waiters in some countries will swipe your ATM card and politely look away while you enter your PIN. Key is building people’s trust in these methods so they can be sure they are secure.
At a Salon on Feb 28, I heard about mobile polling being used to ask men in the Democratic Republic of Congo about sexual assault against men. There was a higher recorded affirmative rate when the question was answered via a mobile survey than when the question had been asked in other settings or though other means. This of course makes sense, considering that often when a reporter or surveyor comes around asking whether men have been victims of rape, no one wants to say publicly. It’s impossible to know in a situation of violence if a perpetrator might be standing around in the crowd watching someone getting interviewed, and clearly shame and stigma also prevent people from answering openly.
Another example at the AfrEA Tech Salon, was a comparison study done by an organization in a slum area in Accra. Five enumerators who spoke local languages conducted Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) surveys by mobile phone using Open Data Kit (an open source survey application) and the responses were compared with the same survey done on paper. When people were asked in person by enumerators if they defecated outdoors, affirmative answers were very low. When people were asked the same question via a voice-based mobile phone survey, 26% of respondents reported open defecation.
2) Risk of collecting GPS coordinates. We had a short discussion on the plusses and minuses of using GPS and collecting geolocation data in monitoring and evaluation. One issue that came up was safety for enumerators who carry GPS devices. Some people highlighted that GPS devices can put staff/enumerators at risk of abuse from organized crime bands, military groups, or government authorities, especially in areas with high levels of conflict and violence. This makes me think that if geographic information is needed in these cases, it might be good to use a mobile phone application that collects GPS rather than a fancy smart phone or an actual GPS unit (for example, one could try out PoiMapper, which works on feature phones).
In addition, evaluators emphasized that we need to think through whether GPS data is really necessary at household level. It is tempting to always collect all the information that we possibly can, but we can never truly assure anyone that their information will not be de-anonymized somehow in the near or distant future, and in extremely high risk areas, this can be a huge risk. Many organizations do not have high-level security for their data, so it may be better to collect community or district level data than household locations. Some evaluators said they use ‘tricks’ to anonymize the geographical data, like pinpointing location a few miles off, but others felt this was not nearly enough to guarantee anonymity.
3) Devices can create unforeseen operational challenges at the micro-level. When doing a mobile survey by phone and asking people to press a number to select a particular answer to a question, one organization working in rural Ghana to collect feedback about government performance found that some phones were set to lock when a call was answered. People were pressing buttons to respond to phone surveys (press 1 for….), but their answers did not register because phones were locked, or answers registered incorrectly because the person was entering their PIN to unlock the phone. Others noted that when planning for training of enumerators or community members who will use their own devices for data collection, we cannot forget the fact that every model of phone is slightly different. This adds quite a lot of time to the training as each different model of phone needs to be explained to trainees. (There are a huge number of other challenges related to devices, but these were two that I had not thought of before.)
4) Motivation in the case of poor capacity to respond. An organization interested in tracking violence in a highly volatile area wanted to take reports of violence, but did not have a way to ensure that there would be a response from an INGO, humanitarian organization or government authority if/when violence was reported. This is a known issue — the difficulties of encouraging reporting if responsiveness is low. To keep people engaged this organization thanks people immediately for reporting and then sends peace messages and encouragement 2-3 times per week. Participants in the program have appreciated these ongoing messages and participation has continued to be steady, regardless of the fact that immediate help has not been provided as a result of reporting.
5) Mirroring physical processes with tech. One way to help digital tools gain more acceptance and to make them more user-friendly is to design them to mirror paper processes or other physical processes that people are already familiar with. For example, one organization shared their design process for a mobile application for village savings and loan (VSL) groups. Because security is a big concern among VSL members, the groups typically keep cash in a box with 3 padlocks. Three elected members must be present and agree to open and remove money from the box in order to conduct any transaction. To mimic this, the VSL mobile application requires 3 PINs to access mobile money or make transactions, and what’s more, the app sends everyone in the VSL Group an SMS notification if the 3 people with the PINs carry out a transaction, meaning the mobile app is even more secure than the original physical lock-box, because everyone knows what is happening all the time with the money.
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As I mentioned in part 1 of this post, some new resources and forthcoming documentation may help to further set the stage for better learning and application of ICTs in the M&E process. Pact has just released their Mobile Technology Toolkit, and Michael Bamberger and I are finishing up a paper on ICT-enabled M&E that might help provide a starting point and possible framework to move things forward.
Here is the list of toolkits, blog posts and other links that we compiled for AfrEA – please add any that are missing!
Previous posts on ICTs and M&E on this blog:
- 12 tips on using ICTs for social monitoring and accountability
- 11 points on strengthening local capacity to use new ICTs for M&E
- 10 tips on using new ICTs for qualitative M&E
- Using participatory video for M&E
- ICTs and M&E at the South Asia Evaluators’ Conclave
- Benefits, barriers and tips for ICT-enabled M&E
- ICTs and M&E at the African Evaluators’ Conference