Imagine collecting data from 2000 beneficiaries per year in over nine developing countries annually. How to administer all the collected data and share the use of a single system amongst local evaluation partners? The International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD) has put itself up to this challenging task to support their unique Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) process.

Monitoring and Evaluation is primarily seen as an instrument for learning, sharing and exchanging knowledge on the ground. This means most of the evaluation activities are performed in the nine countries in which IICD is active. Local M&E partners collect data from beneficiaries, organise Focus Group discussions and write evaluation reports. To support this process, there is a need for a tailor-made low-tech online tool to collect data and download results for further analyses. In the past a similar system was used, but when the M&E process grew in size and importance, a more flexible and user-friendly solution was called for.

Important characteristics
The M&E tool consists of the software package WebEnq version 3, which is developed by two independent system builders. It started last year with an examination of existing tools to facilitate online surveys but none of them had the sophisticated back end combined with low-tech front end to suit IICDs and its target groups needs. As a result IICD has partnered with WebEnq to develop a free/libre open source application. This application is also available for free on the website portal for open source applications, www.sourceforge.net.

The developers of WebEnq are quite unique in that they bring together their experiences in developing countries, open source programming skills and social research expertise. This combination proved to be valuable in designing and executing the M&E tool. Since IICD’s initial contribution to the development of this tool, WebEnq has already been contracted by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) from Canada to support one of their programmes.

The most important characteristics of the tool to suit developing organisations in the South are:

The tool is extremely light.	Connectivity is still an issue for many organisations in rural or even urban areas in the South.
It is 4th generation browser compatible.	Organisations in the South can be unaware of updates, or their hardware cannot cope with updates, or downloading an updated version of a browser costs too much. Therefore one of the requirements for the tool was to be 4th generation compatible (i.e. no javascript, minimal style sheets.)
There is no need to install any type of software besides a browser.	Civil society professionals in the South often do not have their own personal computer, but work in internet cafés or on other borrowed computers. Having to download and install software is not practical, and can be costly.
It has an easy to use online management interface for nonwebmasters.	The culturally determined preconceptions and assumptions embedded in interfaces of applications are often overlooked. The M&E tool is tailor-made for southern professionals with their feedback on the interfaces to increase user-friendliness.
A single web-survey can be provided in several different languages.	This characteristic is especially crucial to the manner in which the gathered information is stored, which determines how it can be analyzed. By enabling multi-lingual surveys, multi-lingual regions or countries can be analyzed as one.

A test and training version of the tool can be found at http://testsurvey.iicd.org. On the homepage beneficiaries can directly fill in questionnaires which are saved in a central database. Since having an internet connection is not evident, especially in rural areas, it is also possible to download and print questionnaires on paper. The management area is password protected to serve the local M&E partners, local training partners and IICD evaluation specialists.

The developers will continue to publish new open source releases of WebEnq, which will be made available on SourceForge. IICD will continue to fine-tune the tool and develop new functionalities, like enhancing online reporting.

More information
Test / training website M&E tool: http://testsurvey.iicd.org
Or contact IICD/Communications: Ellien ten Cate: ecate@iicd.org

Web developing agencies:
Drostan: http://www.drostan.org/
Data-Assist: http://www.data-assist.nl/