Thursday, February 28, 2013

International Development - A development researcher’s best friend

International Development - A development researcher’s best friend: "“Evaluation is a hot topic,” said Louise Broadbent, co-founder and managing director of Surveybe, a data collection and research company. “You can’t implement any sort of development project these days unless you incorporate a baseline, a midline and an endline assessment.”

Collecting the necessary data is often easier said than done. To this day, researchers fan out with pen and paper to conduct surveys – asking rural villagers about their eating habits, urban dwellers about social protections and refugees about their families, for instance. Those who do use computerized survey methods tend to wrestle with software, cumbersome coding and long delays between data collection and analysis.

As a result, even in today’s data-driven world, development projects may be based on information that is incomplete, misleading or outright wrong. The potential impact on a development project can be huge, according to Aidan Coville, who works with the Development Impact Evaluation Initiative, an umbrella organization for the World Bank’s research and evaluation activities."

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