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Monitoring and Evaluation in E-Learning: Five M&E Practices to Measure and Boost the Impact of Online Education Programs
Educational institutions, businesses, nonprofits and other organizations have turned to e-learning during the COVID-19 crisis, and these approaches are likely to remain prevalent in a post-pandemic world. According to Yaquta Kanchwala Fatehi of the William Davidson Institute and Salma Elbeblawi of Soliya, virtual exchange is an area of particular interest and innovation within the broader online education space. They share five key monitoring and evaluation insights that can strengthen these programs in real time – and that can be applied to a variety of e-learning programs.
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- Education, Impact Assessment, Technology
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Press Release: New Reporting Standards Could Energize the Off-Grid Solar Industry
The framework represents a significant step in helping attract the capital needed to lift millions of people out of energy poverty.
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- Energy, Impact Assessment, Technology
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Research that Embraces the Messiness of Real Life: How an Innovative, Tech-Enabled Survey Method is Revealing the True Feelings of the Bottom Billion
Of any population in the world, the poor are the least likely to feel free to speak their minds, which makes it difficult to use surveys to understand and meet their unique needs. Daryl Collins, and Carolina de Miranda and Laura Morínigo of Fundación Capital, explore how tech-enabled research methods can provide a solution to this dilemma. They share how a unique, WhatsApp-based survey approach has helped Fundación Capital understand the nuanced meaning behind the responses of women who participated in a gender norms-focused messaging campaign in Paraguay.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Technology
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The Wild West of ESG Reporting: A New Report Finds a Disturbing Lack of Standards and Transparency
Businesses around the globe have been embracing environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting to demonstrate responsible corporate citizenship and attract investors. But as David A. Fuscus of Xenophon Strategies, Inc. explains, this data is often inconsistently reported and unaudited, and nearly impossible to compare across companies. He shares the results of a recent survey on corporate reporting, and explores how widely used standards and increased transparency could better gauge a company’s actual progress toward more sustainable and responsible practices.
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- Impact Assessment, Investing
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Bringing Impact Data Out of the Dark: Why Impact Investors Need Harmonized Reporting Platforms to Reach Their Goals
Impact reporting today is inconsistent, unverified and locked up in information silos, with multiple, competing reporting platforms and methodologies. As Adam S. Bendell of Toniic explains, this makes it difficult for impact investors to compare and maximize the positive net impact of their investments. The key to solving this dilemma, he says, is to develop an interoperable ecosystem for reporting impact data. He shares four ways the sector could move toward this goal, building a system in which investors can easily compare impact performance across their portfolios.
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- Impact Assessment, Investing
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Better Loans for Better Homes: A New Assessment Tool Helps Microfinance Institutions Increase Their Housing Impact
Most housing in developing countries is self-built and incremental, and these homeowners frequently turn to microfinance institutions (MFIs) to finance it. But according to Naeem Razwani and Jitendra Balanirom of Habitat for Humanity’s Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter and Olivia Nielsen of Miyamoto International, this type of construction process can lead to severe quality and structural issues – while also increasing the lending risk for MFIs. They discuss how a new assessment tool can help these lenders understand and optimize the impact of their home loans to better meet the needs of this market.
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- Finance, Impact Assessment
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Addressing the Unanswered Questions of Sustainable Development: How ‘Lean Experimentation’ Can Boost the SDGs
The deadline for the Sustainable Development Goals is growing closer, and with many targets well behind schedule, extraordinary efforts will be necessary to achieve them. Toshi Nakamura at Kopernik argues that these efforts will require the development sector to quickly answer an important question: Which interventions are effective – and which are not? To that end, he explores the value of Kopernik's "lean experimentation" approach, which can be used to assess a wide range of interventions, to quickly determine which are worth scaling or replicating.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Tags
- impact measurement, research, SDGs
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Surveying the Landscape for Social Investments in Africa: A Major New Study Assesses the Current State of Play on the Continent
The social investment sector in Africa is dynamic and growing – but it’s struggling to close the enormous Sustainable Development Goals financing gap. The African Venture Philanthropy Alliance (AVPA) explored the opportunities and obstacles facing social investors on the continent in an ambitious new study, “The Landscape for Social Investments in Africa.” NextBillion interviewed AVPA’s CEO, Frank Aswani, to discuss the study’s findings, and what they say about the current state of social investment in Africa.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing, Social Enterprise