I have an image of Mel Gibson (whose statue I saw in Edinburgh a few years back in honor of William Wallace…is that an example of art imitating art imitating art imitating life?) holding back his troops as they chomp at the bits for battle when I think of where things are with the Research Team right now. It’s an immensely, almost unbearably, exciting time, but because of what we’re about to do rather than what we’re doing.
An exciting candidate, Nathalie Collins, just accepted an internship offer from us for work in Kuria this summer. She is an IT guru with both NGO and for-profit experience who will take the reigns from David on his work on the Poverty Intelligence Network (PIN) this summer as he goes back to work as our Healthcare program manager. This is exciting because the PIN is such an awesome tool that will truly bring our data management activities to a different level, but it needs the right leadership and advocacy on the ground in order to do that.
In the next two weeks, we shall have our four final reports from our GSPP students on poverty indicators. These reports, along with some external research we have conducted on what other organizations are doing in this realm, will form the foundation of the work we do this summer to develop Metrics 2.0. This revised metrics system will keep us on the cutting edge of poverty eradication.
Stephanie and I have two metrics-related conferences in our plans for June. One is the Aspen Network of Development Entrepeneurs Metrics and Evaluation Conference and another is the Global Health Council’s annual conference, which this year happens to be about Global Health and Metrics. Both of these will be fantastic opportunities for us to meet people trying to tackle the same problems we’re trying to tackle, learn about tools of our trade, and come up with some ideas for potential partnerships and implementation plans.
Finally, we’re working to come up with a database solution for our soon to be real M&E system. We’ve gotten some great proposals from vendors who are ready to build something from scratch for us, and we’ve also discovered some really cool potential off-the-shelf solutions, as you readers of this blog already know from last week’s post. We are very excited at the opportunity to develop a good solution that can integrate with all of our other crazy activities happening in cyber space.
Until next week, thank you for reading!