Blog

Probably every M&E officer has been in this situation: The deadline for the annual report is approaching, but the data is just not ready. It takes time, effort and nerves to go through all the different monitoring documents that have piled up throughout the year and to copy-paste the relevant information into the format that meets the donor’s requirements.

Even when you work in a neatly organized monitoring system and the data actually is complete and up-to-date, your internal monitoring system and the donor’s reporting format might be two very different stories. This is why...

Getting an overview of what’s going on in your team is not always easy. How many times have you written down an important appointment in that old notepad of yours or on that post-it note that’s nowhere to be found anymore? We don’t always add all business appointments or events in our digital calendars immediately, and sometimes it’s easy to lose track of things. For this purpose, a very useful feature that we have incorporated to our wiki tools, is the Events Calendar, which helps you get a good perspective of what’s going on in your team. Our calendar displays different events, in...

Development cooperation often takes place in highly versatile or fragile contexts. But even when the setting is not one of open conflict or severe state weakness, development projects need to be aware of and manage the risks that surround them. This is a challenge for planning, management and monitoring. But what to monitor exactly?

In its 2012 publication “Managing Risks in Fragile and Transitional Contexts”, the OECD distinguishes three types of risks (see graph below). While contextual and institution risks describe processes that the development...

How many tabs on Excel can you actually (and comfortably) work with?

Let’s face it. If you work with spreadsheets, most likely you would like to see few tabs and just about as many columns and rows as your screen can fit without having to eternally scroll down or sideways to see your data (unless you really like scrolling, but I doubt it).

Organizing your projects or contacts does not have to be this way. Wouldn’t it be great if you could use a web-based platform with all relevant databases and then find the information you are looking for through a search mask? Or...