September 2022 Newsletter: GeOnG forum and latest project updates!

After two first collaborations, Expertise France asked for CartONG’s support once again last March, as part of the Innov'i project implemented by the agency in Tunisia. The objective? To provide a dashboard able to monitor the activities of the various project implementation partners, and to showcase the advancement of the project. For the past few months, CartONG has been providing its expertise in data collection, processing and visualization to answer its partner's needs. Learn more about our support here.

After Terre des hommes’ field delegations identified the implementation of WASH activities in detention centers as a major challenge due to a lack of resources and technical tools adapted to the specificities of these institutions, their team reached out to CartONG to develop a new FACET tool, called FACET WinD. The objective of this collaboration was therefore to develop, test and disseminate a set of standardized tools to evaluate the sanitary conditions of people living in detention, and in particular to measure the different levels of service related to access to water, hygiene, sanitation, waste treatment, maintenance and cleanliness of the prison environment. Learn more here.

CartONG has been working on the OPSMAPs for several years now. This tool - taking the shape of a web application - is used by the Camp Coordination and Camp Management Cluster and UNHCR operations to display indicators on the refugee sites they manage. In the last two years in particular, our work has been focusing on putting in place an automatic process so the tool can be made available in less than one hour by our web development team. Most of the work is now centered on improving the data component of the application, such as data cleaning and setting up the tool by filling a configuration file. With this tool, all UNHCR and CCCM operations can thus not only have at their disposal a standard version, which can be up and running extremely quickly, but are also able to input some specific information related to their context of operation. Data can be stored on an Excel sheet, Google Sheet, or CKAN application. There is also the possibility to get the history of the previous data collections conducted in the managed site, to get a full picture of its evolution over time. We are on our way to get ten OPSMAPs up and running by the end of the year, and here below is an example for the Burkina Faso sites.

A quick panorama of some of the other training and awareness raising activities we conducted this quarter...

• After a rollout and several training efforts in June to which a total 28 users from various NGOs as Medical Referral UNHCR Partners in South Sudan, a follow-up session was conducted in July to gather feedback, answer questions and provide recommendations when using the new system. 
• A 3-day MEAL training session was organized for 13 staff members of Expertise France. Through 8 modules tailored for Project Officers and Pole Managers, the training covered the core principles, the building and implementing of a MEAL system, with case studies and practical exercises on collecting, processing, analyzing and using data.
• From June 29th to July 1st, associations and citizens met in Grenoble during the Forum International pour le Bien Vivre. CartONG presented a workshop "Feedback on 2 years of the Cartes d'ici & d'ailleurs project" addressing questions such as: in what social context do the psychological suffering of migrant people occur? How can subjective mapping workshops help address it? 20 persons also participated in an initiation to subjective mapping.
• Like every year, CartONG also took part in the Forum of the associations in Chambéry on September 10th during a sunny afternoon. It was an opportunity to recruit some local volunteers but also to raise awareness amongst the inhabitants of Chambéry about international solidarity projects led by local organizations.

The Learning Corner is getting bigger! You'll find that the Mobile Data Collection and GIS toolboxes that were previously in blog post format have now been migrated to the Learning Corner in an effort to make them more user-friendly, with some updates. Other toolboxes have also been improved with practical exercises, such as the “Excel-ling in the field” toolbox.

As we are on the topic of translation, we have also done a huge effort to help francophone actors have better access to relevant sector resources on the question of data, through the translation to French of the OCHA responsible data guidance notes (available here), of The Engine Room guidance on how to Retain, Archive and Dispose of data responsibly (available here) and ACAPS resources around data analysis and quality (available here).