At the UN in Viet Nam, we had a hunch that sharing costs associated with IT equipment, infrastructure, and skilled staff would improve our overall efficiency and save costs. With this hypothesis in mind, we started working on an integrated One United Nations Information Communications and Technology (One UN ICT) system as part of the reforms of the Delivering as One initiative.
Results, results, results. The age old monitoring and evaluation question: how do you [actually] draw a connection between transformational changes in the lives of people and the development projects that aim to help them?
Many people see the internet as the best means of communicating, reporting and sharing information while others see it as a link between people, offices, countries and the rest of the world.
Surveys carried out over mobile phones are capturing timely data on food supply and access. The mVAM project of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) is piloting mobile voice technology for household food security.
When crisis strikes, data – normally provided by national counterparts – suddenly can be in short supply, or outright unavailable. Each organization scrambles to find, or produce, the basic data they need to function in the crisis, with little time to consider common data needs, common collection systems or data sharing. The result is often translated into disconnected or overlapping responses, or simply the lack of appropriate responses.
