In 2018, CartONG conducted two challenging Information Management (IM) needs assessment missions, during which we evaluated the IM policies, processes, practices and tools implemented by the Solidarités International’s teams in response to the refugee crisis in Bangladesh as well as the Syrian crisis.

For these rapid assessments of information management needs, CartONG interviewed the key players to evaluate their expectations, fears and difficulties, and reviewed the existing documentation and processes in place for the IM tools used by the local Solidarités’ teams as well as the available IM products. As part of these missions, we also facilitated workshops and conducted a review of the key existing project documents to identify the IM needs per activity and the potential constraints related to donor requirements. The deliverables of these two needs assessments missions were a report and a list of recommendations and suggested priorities. The support provided by CartONG in the Middle East had the particularity of taking place following the launch of a new  consortium (therefore still in its infancy), and was thus mostly focused on strategic aspects; whereas the mission in Bangladesh was an opportunity to identify the capacity-building needs of the local IM team which then led to a two-week training mission on various topics such as MDC, mapping and data protection.

Eradicating poverty is hampered by unreliable or non-existent data and the lack of skills and incentives to use it. The Global Partnership on Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD) addresses this challenge by improving the effective use of data, filling key data gaps, harmonizing data specifications and architectures, expanding data literacy and capacity, increasing openness and leverage of existing data and mobilizing political will and resources. The GPSDD funded project “Building a Data Collaborative” sets out to do so in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Malawi and seeks to enable better targeted action towards reaching the health and WASH SDG targets.

The consortium

The Netherlands Red Cross is with its humanitarian data initiative 510 one of the front runners in promoting the use of data in the Red Cross movement. NLRC is the overall project manager, implementer in Malawi with the Malawi Red Cross and is responsible for the methodology, technical support and M&E.

CartONG is a French NGO supporting humanitarian and development actors with information management and data analysis, and promoting data sharing. CartONG works together with DRC’s OpenStreetMap community and Médecins Sans Frontières-Switzerland in DRC.

Approach

This project will create a Data Collaborative, a semi-formal, long term collaboration, that brings volunteer & technical communities (VTCs) and in particular OpenStreetMap communities, humanitarian and development organizations together with National Statistics Offices, businesses, and other civil society organizations.

The Data Collaborative will:

• Identify and address legal, technical and commercial barriers to data sharing.
• Raise awareness and build capacity of key stakeholders.
• Map currently available geospatial data on WASH & health SDG indicators, and identify gaps.
• Review data curation and dissemination platforms, develop workflows on data migration to/from them.
• Build tools and trainings on data visualization to make the data actionable to decision makers.

Simultaneously, the project will pilot a new methodology to monitor a specific set of SDGs indicators, (3.3; 3.8; 6.1; 6.2). The pilots in both DRC and Malawi will combine official with non-official data. This includes field mapping and remote, crowdsourced data collection (through the Missing Maps workflow).

To learn more about this data collaborative project and its lessons learned, check out the detailed news that was published following the end of the project.

iRHIS (integrated Refugee Health Information System) is an open source tablet and web platform that was developed by GNUCOOP to allow health workers to electronically register and track the health status of refugees in camps, as well as guide UNHCR public health and implementing partners to rapidly detect public health problems and epidemics.

In 2018, CartONG developed two comprehensive training guides tailored to the different diverse health staff profiles comprising of data collectors and supervisors. Three in-country training were conducted on the use of the iRHIS platform for patients individual consultation data collection, online data synchronization to generate reports and the use of the automatic analysis dashboards.

CartONG has helped Tdh to support its field teams through the development of tutorials and tools to help improve the data protection practices in the field.

All of the public documentation is available on the MDC-Toolkit website. The MDC Toolkit is composed of 40 documents – created under a free license- to support the use of mobile data collection by the Tdh’s field teams as well as all the actors of the humanitarian and development sectors. The MDC Toolkit is combined with a Data Visualization Toolkit whose purpose is to help field staff improve their data visualization practices, and which may be found in the Analyze your data section of the website.