MobileActive.org

What prevents humanitarian non-government organizations (NGOs) from adopting technology that can potentially improve their operations and response time? Global Relief Technologies, a producer of handheld data collection devices, asked a New York University Capstone Team to research the barriers to NGO PDA adoption. The Capstone Team conducted 17 interviews with nine organizations, from animal welfare to humanitarian relief, to discover the financial, technical, and institutional barriers preventing groups from implementing technology into their field programs. The Team also conducted two case studies of groups currently using PDA technology, one domestic and one international, to explore in depth the factors that went into the decision making processes these groups followed in their technology acquisition decisions.

The Management of the Emergency Capacity Building Project called for a final evaluation of the Project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft Corporation to assess progress towards its stated goal and outcomes “to improve the speed, quality and effectiveness of the humanitarian community in saving lives, improving welfare and protecting the rights of people in emergencies.” The main objective of the evaluation is to review progress towards project objectives and goals, to inform future endeavors, and to learn. The primary users of the Final Evaluation are the Senior Managers at the IWG agencies, the Interagency Working Group Emergency Directors, project donors, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft Corporation, as well as agency staff working on the project. The evaluation used a mixed methods approach, including interviewing individuals, holding focus group discussions with most agencies, and conducting two field surveys, one to partner organizations and one to field staff. A limitation to the evaluation was less than full access to field perspectives due to time/resource constraints and the practical inability to contact all the key staff and partners, as well as non-IWG contacts involved in the project – there simply were more than time permitted (over 500 persons). However, 93 agency staff, partners and non-IWG agencies and individuals were interviewed or surveyed. Because of the complexity of the project, evaluators were given a greater page limit to address all the points in the Terms of Reference.