Opinions

Over the last decade, DevResults has invested time and resources into learning what best practices enable us to be a lean company while still supporting some of the biggest government agencies, implementing partners, and non-profits in the international development and humanitarian sector. Recently, my colleague released a blog post on how we have as a company have created a remote work culture that has been going strong for ten years. »

Here at DevResults, we believe in transparency and openness. It's in our company culture code. It's why we support things like the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), both philosophically and technically. And as part of the international development community, we just think transparency and openness make sense. That's why we've been following the development and implementation of USAID's Open Data Policy, aka ADS 579, aka the Development Data Library (DDL) »

It's been happening again lately: I'll be working with an organization to figure out how we can help them manage their data. They'll be excited about working with our team, getting organized, and of course, a future filled with beautiful visualization and dashboards. Then, I'll get the call/email. "My boss/board/C-suite exec wants to know if we'll own the system." "Do we have to keep paying for the »

While there is no way to guarantee that M&E software will solve all of your problems or make all of your colleagues happy, there absolutely are things you can do during the discovery, procurement, and contracts stages to mitigate against the risk of getting bamboozled. #1 – Trust no one. Test everything. Most development practitioners I speak with are balancing a heavy load of client work, internal programmatic and »

The donors of the world invested $132 billion last year in global development projects, but most donors and implementers are still unable to account for results. And most development workers in the field still don't have the tools they deserve. The solution is not to keep trying to re-create commercially available software in-house. Some history: A few years back, before we made DevResults, we were a web development shop. Much »

Open-source software is an amazing phenomenon. But it's not the answer for international development, any more than it is in any other field. I love open-source software. I'm writing this blog post in Ghost, an open-source blogging platform, using Google Chrome, a (mostly) open-source browser built on top of the open-source Blink engine. Ghost runs on Node.js, which is also open source. The DevResults app is built using open-source »

DevResults is a bootstrapped software company, meaning we’re funded only by our revenue. In almost every way, this has been a dream come true. The independence has granted us the freedom to define how we work and what we work on. Most importantly, we’ve been able to focus on helping our clients, instead of meeting investor expectations. But bootstrapping has its disadvantages. Since our start in 2004, we’ »

Aid transparency is not an end in itself: It is a means towards an end. Transparency leads to greater accountability, and accountability leads to greater effectiveness. The donors and others who are committing to publish data are, in effect, agreeing to be held accountable: Accountable to each other, and ultimately accountable to the citizens in the recipient countries and to the taxpayers in donor countries. The International Aid Transparency Initiative »

We're in the process of adding import and export support for the IATI XML format to DevResults. Although IATI is primarily conceived as a public transparency standard (hence the T), many organizations are beginning to see it as a promising interchange format for reporting results — either outbound reporting (to a funder, or to a home office) or inbound reporting (from a grantee or contractor). However, the IATI standard currently »

There are lots of obstacles inhibiting the flow of development data. One important one is the lack of common standards for performance indicators. We would like to start just by creating a clearinghouse of existing indicator lists, and then using crowdsourcing tools to cross-reference these. Apples to apples It's difficult, even with a relatively small and self-contained universe (like a single international NGO, or a single USAID mission) to agree »

Three decades ago, foreign aid professionals like my father had to cobble together homemade databases in order to keep track of their work. Today, not much has changed, and practitioners in the field still lack the software tools they need to count their outputs and analyze their impact. DevResults is working to change that, by creating easy-to-use software specifically intended for monitoring and managing foreign aid programs. This is the »

Data has the potential to really transform the way foreign aid is done. Better data makes it possible for donors to be transparent. It makes it possible for decisions and priorities to be evidence-based. It makes it possible to hold everyone involved more accountable. Let's go beyond the hype, though, and talk about the actual mechanics of capturing and using development data. This article is adapted from a talk that »