Remote Sensing: Welcome to the New Data-Enhanced Era of M&E Tech

Demonstrating impact has become an important focus in international development. Yet, how to accurately capture this impact is a challenge many organizations are grappling with. In fact, many rely on twentieth-century data collection techniques that are poorly suited to the task.

In practice, this often means infrequent paper surveys designed to document the self-reported behavior of individuals and their families. The problem of this approach is that it opens the door to important measurement errors. There have been ample cases of courtesy bias (respondents trying to please enumerators by telling them whatever they think they want to hear) or recall bias (providing erroneous information due to difficulties in recollection) in development interventions. Not to mention large-scale surveying can be extremely costly to implement.

The improvement of data collection methods, it turns out, has not caught up yet with the recent push for more rigorous monitoring and evaluation. We have all heard the stories of those malaria bed nets used as fishing nets or those water pumps that quickly fell into decay – most often because local communities were not consulted in the design process. The point is: Whatever we are delivering to people, they might not use it or maintain it as we originally thought.

So if we want to know whether we are making a difference in people’s lives, we need to assess the sustained impact of our programs. This means looking at adoption and usage rates (hard to measure) instead of coverage or installation (easy to measure). Something traditional data collection methods have failed to achieve.

Read More: Remote Sensing: Welcome to the New Data-Enhanced Era of M&E Tech – ICTworks