humanitarian.info

Fellow itinerant keyboard-basher Michael Howden sent me a link to the specification that he developed for monitoring and evaluation (M&E) database that he’s developed for Save the Children in Aceh. He’s become something of a one-man database development shop recently, working in Aceh and Pakistan and soon in Uganda.

In the accompanying post, he mentions that the critical difference between development work and emergency relief is that the former operates on a much longer timeframe than the latter. In my experience, development projects aren’t necessarily any longer-term in their thinking than emergency projects, but that’s not my main point.

Michael is talking specifically about the problem of incorporating qualitative information into M&E processes, particularly if you’re building a database to deal with those processes. Qualitative info - narrative text, pictorial records, and so on - is notoriously difficult to deal with.

I tend towards the maxim “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, so I often question the value of much qualitative information for the purposes of project management. It is extremely useful, however, for a number of other things - fundraising or advocacy work, for example.

This argument often gets me into bar fights with disgruntled development workers, who feel that the qualitative information is in fact the more important stuff. In particular there’s a feeling that factors such as capacity or attitude can’t be measured by numbers alone, which may be true; but they can be measured (opinion polls being the obvious example), and that makes them amenable to a quantitative approach.