GeoEnabling the Project Cycle management

"Prevent and respond to climate change" is a project funded by the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation.

The 3-year project was designed to give answers to a long drought that affected many African countries between 2015 and 2017 and focused on the area covering the Lubombo Region in Eswatini and the Districts of Boane and Namaacha in Mozambique.

 COSPE Onlus  is the implementing agency of the project in collaboration with  WeWorld-GVC Onlus  and  Progettomondo.mlal .

The project strategy is based on a theory of change that acts in three directions simultaneously: 

1. Respond to emergency, by providing inputs and water;
2. Build resilience through working with farmers with a value chain focus, as farmers need to build up their own tools and capacities to respond to climate change effects, in their own, specific context;
3. Run a model and leverage a system enabling the project board to understand if the process works, to identify good practices and then to replicate them.

In this report are presented the model and the tools realized by  gisAction  to enable the project board to demonstrate the Theory of Change's impact.

A Geographic Information System-based model which supports the whole Project Cycle Management.

Each strategic and operational phase is supported by a tailored application responding to specific functional requirements and user's needs, without dispersing nor duplicating the valuable data collected and produced by projects.

All the data collected, created or edited are gathered into a single web platform, which makes them accessible everywhere. Each petal corresponds to a specific project management need.

Take a look at the flower of solutions configured for this case study.

The base cartography construction allows users to define and acquire knowledge about the intervention territory.

(Geo)design means integrating the Science of Where right into the design process.

Let's see how a GIS can respond to the Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) workflow: How to set up a Monitoring Information System.

Setting up a Monitoring Information System pass by some iterative Co-Design processes which means adopting a collaborative and multi-competences approach to combine people' knowledge and skills and geography.

As in the traditional workflow, the starting point was defining a proper set of resilience indicators and questions to collect data able to measure people, communities and systems' vulnerability to the main risks they face and their capacity to mitigate these risks. 

How to improve and to geo-enable the traditional monitoring tools and workflow?

The questionnaires (paper) have been turned into GIS layers (tablet) through a collaborative data model design and then into web services to make them accessible across the organization accordingly to the specific workflows and dataflow.

Development projects need quality data and all stakeholders, supervisors, technicians, fieldworkers need to deeply understand the new keywords introduced by the technology and the new workflow. The essential step for the whole system to be successful lies down to the ability to initiate the knowledge transfer since the beginning through some geo literacy of the project teams and institutional partners.

For supporting the Field Data Collection process, two kinds of apps have been designed.

The first type concerns the ground-scouting: mobile apps for collecting data in the field which can be used online and offline. Each M&E indicator has its own dedicated data collection application which is configured according to the type of needed information.

When there are questionnaires that focus on qualitative and quantitative answers and capture (i) the place where the interview has been administered or (ii) the position of an infrastructure or (iii) the farmer' household, it is possible to choose a form-centered mobile app.

When it needs (i) to track a road line or (ii) to draw the farmer' field perimeter and measure the cultivated area, or also (iii) to capture the coordinates of a point relationed to other items within the map, a map-centered interface is really helpful and makes the work easier.

The second type of apps supporting the Field Data Collection are related to the campaign monitoring and the data quality check.

Below the screenshot of the Field Operations Monitoring App, the interactive dashboard shows in a single view the map of all the monitoring data that workers are collecting in the field and a set of indicators pointing to the underlined data. The widgets have been pre configured according to the descriptive statistics the manager needs to monitor. Every time the field workers access an internet connection, data are synchronized and the map and the widgets automatically update.

Anyone who has ever organized a data collection campaign knows that within a questionnaire only a few set of questions are unavoidably mandatory! Those are the answers without whose the indicator cannot be measured. Moreover, as simple as the questionnaire is, there will always be some tricky questions, and some tricky answers...!

While the Field Operations Monitoring Dashboard allows you to evaluate the campaign progress in near real time, the Data Quality Check App enables you to make a deeper check of collected data.

Within this app you can filter, query, compare and correct data.

Within a Monitoring Information System, the grounded data can be overlaid and enriched by remote sensing imagery.

The imagery analysis has been used for measuring the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index over time to evaluate the productivity trend of the maize plots selected sample throughout different years.

To be able to present relevant and accurate information to various stakeholders in a timely fashion is essential for an effective decision-making process as well as for efficient stakeholder management.

The dashboard presents tailored information related to activities, outputs and outcomes. Project managers can visualize a web cartography, automatically updated, for planning and for the daily management of activities.

Providing information on “where”, “what” “who” and “when” makes a result based management approach easier.  

Here we can demonstrate: Gain insight and measure the impact, evaluate change, advocate, provide accountability.

The M&E Dashboard provides a synthetic visualization on graphic and cartographic basis for a systematic monitoring of the implementation.

A rigorous sampling design coupled with remote sensing and ground-scouting applications turned into user-friendly dashboards, making high quality data accessible for anyone who's working on Rural Communities Resilience...

WOW! you must tell this story!

Finally, harness the power of the cartographic storytelling apps to share your results, your story, your heros, your data... Build compelling StoryMaps to reach out different audiences, to advocate and trigger a public engagement.

Use the StoryMap for sharing the M&E Report, it would provide a transparent and accountable medium through which staff, and external stakeholders, can establish whether the organization is meeting outcomes.

Have a look at the  StoryMap of the M&E Report  for Prevent and Respond to Climate Change project.

Finally, what to do with all these data? 

• ...sharing quality data for demonstrating good practices and start over locally;
• ...sharing quality data for institutional and donors advocacy for multiplying the process everywhere;
• ...sharing quality data across the organization, providing the organization with the opportunity to become a thought leader and contributor to the growing base of evidence for Development.