The rapid advances in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) sector have led to an influx of innovations that enhance Monitoring, Learning and Evaluation activities within organisations. Within this sector, Digital Data Collection platforms and applications have emerged, providing solutions that focus on the use of online servers based systems and use of mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets to develop survey tools and field data collection. Digital data collection systems by-pass the often cumbersome task of data entry, allowing collected data to be deployed directly to the online servers for analysis.

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In more recent years the use of ICTs has been adopted by the development and humanitarian sector where in the past, paper based surveys were the most common method for monitoring and evaluation. Paper-based methods are relatively costly, time-consuming, and largely susceptible to human error.

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In Zimbabwe, an increasing numbers of development have adopted these systems by designing and employing innovative research methods utilising ICT-based approaches. These approaches are proving useful, for instance, in the areas of monitoring, evaluation and communication.

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Case studies show that mobile technology is especially useful for monitoring and evaluation (M&E) purposes, because of the advantages it holds over traditional modalities for data collection. In addition to the reduced cost and time, mobile-based data collection features the following:

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• Higher quality and more complete data availability because the data is collected directly from local respondents.

• Use of real-time or near real-time trend spotting with visualization tools. Synthesizing data into infographics with Geographic Information System (GIS) tools often helps describe a situation better than the usual series of tables and charts. Real-time data enables better decision-making, adaptive management, and improved allocation of limited resources.

• Greater data security and archiving.

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Digital Development Solutions (DDS) provides digital solutions or software applications that enable organisations to perform remote monitoring and evaluation data collection and to have real-time data.

 

The services on offer include the following:

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OPTION A – Design of Survey/ Data Collection Tools and Technical Support

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We will tailor make your data collection system. Activities covered under this option include:

• Recommending the best solution that allows for collecting monitoring and evaluation data in real-time

• Creating and configuring an account for your organisation on the online server system

• Working with the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning personnel to develop survey/ data collection tools

• Configuring mobile devices (phones and tablets) for field data collection

• Training of enumerators on the data collection and data uploading techniques

• Technical support in aggregation of field data

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OPTION B: - Capacity Building for Organisational Staff

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The highly interactive and practical training focuses on the following:

• Train staff on designing survey or data collection tools enabling users to easily create different kinds of survey forms through intuitive yet powerful tools.

• Uploading survey/ data collection tools on the server

• Downloading forms onto the mobile devices

• Off-line data collection with mobile devices in the field

• Uploading collected field data to the server

• Downloading and transferring data for analysis (SPSS, Stata, Excel and GIS etc)