(PRESS RELEASE); Digital tools and platforms are playing an increasingly central role in public and service delivery, and offer exciting new possibilities for measurement, learning and evaluation. The Government of Samoa’s drive to develop digital systems such as the Government’s digital platform will see the adoption of new data standards and digital data processing workflows that would span multiple government entities.
This is an area that the National Digital ID project will enable through interoperability with the various government programmes that are branching out in the digital zones in various sectors of the country and becoming ‘always on’ and reaching wider and more diverse groups of users. These can result in large datasets with messy and multi-format datasets that require new methods and analytical tools. Digital data and analytics are also being increasingly applied to offline interventions to complement traditional monitoring and evaluation tools. Each of these digital methods presents new possibilities for ongoing monitoring, rapid assessments, and novel impact indicators. But they require new paradigms and frameworks for monitoring and evaluation that are built on and retain the methodological rigour of traditional methods.
A workshop on digital data analytics for monitoring and evaluation is being held this week to help support these plans.
The workshop, from December 6 – 10, complements the alignment of continuous work in building national capacity for government data professionals to provide a thorough grounding in the role of digital analytics, including exploring some of the opportunities, challenges, and considerations in leveraging these tools.
It also includes an exploration of two open-source tools: RapidPro, a digital messaging platform to gather digital data, and R Studio, a resource that can organize and analyze textual data. These tools have been selected due to their wide-ranging usefulness for international development projects and programmes.
At the end of the workshop, participants would have gathered a strong and practical understanding of the role of digital analytics and how digital data sources would enable them to explore how to apply the understanding of the tools presented in the workshop to their current data workflows in their organizations, while at the same time increasing their understanding of the digital analytics landscape that include advancements and use-cases.
The workshop is conducted by Mr. Calum Handforth, an expert in digital transformation and digitalization and smart cities with the United Nations Development Programme’s Global Centre for Technology, Innovation, and Sustainable Development in Singapore, and Dr Claudia Abreu Lopes of the United Nations University’s International Institute for Global Health in Malaysia. This is all part of the Government’s drive to advance digital transformation. The government, through the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, and supported by UNDP, seeks to strengthen the capacity of those in government who are leading different sectors to use better data processing methodologies and new data management ideas that will guide reporting and evaluation of national needs.
