The RESILAC (Inclusive Economic and Social Recovery of Lake Chad) project and consortium identified during its start-up phase the need to improve the management of its information (also called Information Management or IM). CartONG is supporting Groupe URD in charge of the operational M&E system (système de suivi et d'évaluation des réalisations) on the information management component.

To this end, CartONG :

1. is carrying out an information management diagnosis (all technologies combined) in order to formalize the needs of stakeholders, identify existing constraints and opportunities and propose solution scenarios
2. will implement some of the recommendations made at the end of the diagnosis (and subsequently formalized in the form of an action and reinforcement plan) on one or two pilot sites to test their relevance, before considering their possible deployment at the project level.
3. will ensure the skills development of the teams concerned in the pilot site(s).

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.

In June 2016, following a second bidding process,  CartONG was one of the organizations (including iMMAP and MapAction) to be retained by the UNICEF West and Central Africa Regional Office, setting the framework to be deployed in the WCARO region to support UNICEF country operations in Information Management and Mapping.

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.