About Creative Associates International

Creative in an international development firm providing outstanding, on-the-ground development services and forging partnerships to deliver sustainable solutions to global challenges.

Its experts focus on building inclusive educational systems, transitioning communities from conflict to peace, developing sustainable economic growth, engaging youth, promoting transparent elections and more. Creative is recognized for its ability to quickly adapt and excel in conflict and post-conflict environments.

To deliver a high degree of service, innovative theories of change and solid project evaluation, Creative is divided into four program divisions:

• Education
• Communities in Transition
• Economic Growth
• Cross Function

Since its founding in 1977 by four enterprising women, Creative has been a results-driven organization. In the area of education, for example, since 2000 Creative has trained nearly 390,000 teachers in new strategies, approaches and pedagogical techniques. About 45 percent of the teachers are based in Africa.

Thanks to the support of international clients, multilateral donors and the private sector, Creative has active programs in 20 countries—from Honduras to Tanzania and Yemen to Cambodia. Since its founding, Creative has undertaken projects in more than 85 countries.

Today, the Creative counts on a professional staff of more than 1,000 people around the world who are committed to working with officials, nongovernmental organizations and community members to realize the positive change they seek.

Learn more at creativeassociatesinternational.com.

New technologies are opening up all kinds of possibilities for improving our efforts in monitoring development programs and evaluating our short and long-term impact. In fact, the M&E field is undergoing a revolution in data collection and analysis, thanks to technological innovations from sensors to drones to constituent-driven multimedia campaigns that catch us by surprise.

These and other new technologies and engagement opportunities are turning old M&E processes and methodologies on their heads and the demand for quantifiable results is more important than ever. From foundations, to bilaterals, to individual donors, there is an expectation for real-time feedback as it happens. Yet, there is still a gap between donor hopes and implementer realities, and we must ask ourselves:

• Beyond surveys and dissemination, how can ICT systematically improve M&E?
• How real is real-time data? And is it really timely? And how timely is really necessary?
• What ethics should we have with constituent data and privacy? And how can we enforce them?
• How can we use ICT to close feedback loops and truly involve communities in development decisions?
• What are the best practices in embedding M&E into an ICT4D program? Who is doing it right?

Overall, new technologies are enabling M&E to be at the heart of data-driven development, where constituents can be powerful co-evaluators of our work. Yet, all these conflicting trends can seem overwhelming when trying to find effective ways to build evidence-based interventions that can scale.

These issues and more will be addressed at the M&E Tech Conference DC, held September 25 and 26, 2014 in Washington, DC. The conference is supported by The Rockefeller Foundation, GSMA, and FHI 360.

Session Description

Don’t be content with boring bar charts and line diagrams – liberate your data and make it beautiful, engaging, and worth the effort you spent collecting and analyzing it. In this session, learn about new ways data can be visualized and get hands-on help with social network analysis, GIS, and good old Excel to make data insightful for stakeholders.

On Friday, September 26, 2014, I’ll be contributing to one of the breakout sessions titled What’s Next in Visualizing Data for Better Decision Making? Kendra Keith, Rachel Trichler, Taylor Corbett, and I will each be sharing tools and resources for sharing M&E data.

Learn more and register: http://mandetech.org