MONITORING AND EVALUATION OF ICT PROJECTS

Surprisingly, since I never considered myself an evaluation expert, I have become the editor of the Monitoring and Evaluation topic page of the Development Gateway. The page was originally conceived of as serving the community of Country Gateways being formed around the Development Gateway Foundation.

The Country Gateways are, of course, efforts to utilize Internet technology to provide resources and forums for the economic and social development communities working in and for specific developing nations. Many of the resources we have posted on the M&E topic page therefore deal with the evaluation of portals, and of country gateways.

The DG Foundation not only supports the Country Gateways, but also a network of Research and Training Centers (in India and Korea so far, but with Centers soon to open in China and Rwanda), the Development Gateway Forum, and a grants program working on e-government. These other programs have a common theme of ICT for development. We have therefore been expanding the M&E topic page to provide resources to the participants in those other projects. Thus we have been adding a few resources on evaluation of educational and research programs.

The collection now has passed 150 resources, and seems quite likely to be of interest to a number of people in the Knowledge for Development community. I invite you all to participate. Join as members of the topic page community and receive alerts when new content is added. I would especially invite you to submit useful resources on evaluation and monitoring of ICT for Development projects and programs. There is a lot out there, and I could use support in finding and evaluating resources.