Support to the UNHCR Livelihoods Monitoring Framework

Description

CartONG has been supporting since 2018 the UNHCR Livelihoods Monitoring Framework project, which is designed to promote a standardized approach to tracking UNHCR’s livelihoods programme performance and impact through a set of global indicators. 

From a technical perspective, the system relies on mobile data collection technology to provide timely monitoring resources and feedback, allowing better data-driven decision-making. Mobile data collection speeds data collection processes and decreases survey errors. Together with a standardized yet flexible approach for customizing monitoring survey tools tailored to field operation’s needs, as well as the data-cleaning and analysis implemented by HQ, CartONG is able to provide timely and high-quality data. Additionally, the project furthers the organizational goal of promoting open access to real-time data for partnership and planning purposes by publishing anonymized results as soon as they become available into the Livelihoods Information System platform, an open-data platform available publicly.    

During this partnership, CartONG supported the project through different actions. These mainly included:  

• Administration of Livelihoods Information System (LIS) open data platform:  CartONG administers and updates, in close relationship with the United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC), the LIS Open Data platform to ensure the availability of real-time information on global indicators, and that the country profiles page remains up to date with Country Analysis Notes and household beneficiary data. 

• Support on system maintenance to ensure the smooth running of monitoring systems. CartONG keeps the system’s technical documentation up to date. This documents the entire monitoring system scripts, and makes it easier to maintain the developer’s documentation, keep track of any new changes to the code and easily involve new developers who can help fix the system’s bugs or work on new features. 

• Support on data quality check, analysis and reporting. Since January 2023, the CartONG team has been supporting operations on the quality check of Baseline and Endline data as soon as participating operations submitted any data. Each time new data is submitted, the data is harmonized and cleaned.

• Training on mobile data collection tools to select field operations through webinars and personalized follow-up calls. This training is provided on an ongoing basis to operations using the LIS system for the first time and to those with new livelihood officers in place as well as to any operations willing to receive refresher training. 

• Review and adapt key training materials and survey tools in order to improve the user experience. CartONG developed, updated and translated (in collaboration also with the NGO Clear Global) several Livelihood training guides to help Livelihoods focal points and partners better understand and use the monitoring tools.