Can Big Data Be Used for Program Evaluation?

Nonprofit-Open-Data-Collective Written by

A couple of recent publications highlight potential uses of “big data” for traditional M&E or program evaluation purposes.

  • Claudia Abreu Lopes, Savita Bailur, Giles Barton-Owe (2018). “Can big data be used for evaluation? A UN Women feasibility study.” United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. LINK
  • Michael Bamberger (2016). Integrating big data into the monitoring and evaluation of development programs. UN Global Pulse. LINK

These reports include a variety of non-traditional data sources and many interesting examples.

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Sample Framework for NGO Web Domains

David Oldenkamp, formerly the International Documents Librarian at Indiana University, started a database of 415 international NGOs and their web domains. The list has been expanded and incorporated into a an NGO custom search engine to search within all of the domains for content.

NGO Datasets

Dataworld, a social network for data sharing, has over 250 datasets listed related to NGOs and nonprofits.

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