ICED, in collaboration with the Committee on Sustainability Assessment (COSA) and GDI, has developed and commenced the testing of agile monitoring systems in Africa. The project is targeted at developing systems and draws on a blend of technology and rigorous metrics that make quick, low-cost, evidence-based decisions possible for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s (BMGF) AgDev Program investments. A key objective is to get reasonably rigorous data into the hands of decision makers much more frequently than typical evaluations.
Drawing on years of monitoring and impact evaluation experience, the team has developed standardized indicators and metrics and built them into globally available technology, which permits the test of different scenarios to determine the levels of data accuracy and inclusiveness that are possible in different contexts. The project is intended to compile guidance on the potential uses of agile systems for the Gates Foundation and for other organizations and programs to measure and track their progress and improve their evidence-based decision making.
ICED is the implementation partner for projects initiated under this arrangement in Africa.
ICED has collaborated with COSA and other partners such as World Poultry Foundation (WPF) and Sustained Africa to implement the agile monitoring systems in Zimbabwe and Uganda, with similar engagements to start in Malawi, Mozambique, and Rwanda, among others. To a large extent, ICED provides technical and field support for the implementation of the agile monitoring system by contributing to the development of learning questions, questionnaires, programming of questions into digital-assisted tools, data collection, data cleaning, and data management. At this stage, all data collection exercises have been done remotely using Computerized Assisted Telephone Interviews (CATI).
The objective is to establish functional, scalable, agile data gathering and monitoring systems that deliver timely, credible, and actionable data to inform evidence-based decision making for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s agricultural development sustainability investments.
The aim is to have an agile data approach with low-cost, easy-to-use technologies in three primary domains:
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