Upon meeting current students of the NOHA Erasmus Mundus Master in Humanitarian Assistance from Groningen University (the Netherlands) at the 8th The Humanitarian Congress in Berlin (28 and 29 October 2011, see link), I was asked to participate as a Guest Lecturer at the NOHA MSc Humanitarian Assistance course a little later. As a NOHA graduate myself, this was a great experience (which took place last week)! However, remembering my time as a student, three hours of theory on indicators and monitoring is quite a challenge…
Since so much theory is already given in study programs; it became time to get this theoretical knowledge into practice! Knowing project management, importance of evaluation, theories of monitoring, discussed LOGICAL frameworks… but time for a translation: how do field realities look like?
The course was divided into three parts; whereas the first part of the course a presentation was given on the life of a humanitarian field expat. Living in isolated places, challenging working environments, colleagues as housemates and family in one, people management in different cultures, working under stress and dealing with emergencies. The second part continued into field realities regarding Information Management and Project Monitoring. How do you measure what you need to measure, how to define indicators and what are the major obstacles regarding those two topics (information management and monitoring). The last part of the course was concerned with ActivityInfo, presenting the program, which obstacles can be overcome, how it makes organisations focus on common indicator setting and finally how to work with ActivityInfo.
How time flies… these three hours passed by so quickly. The students were pleased with the connection of practice to theory, but the topic in itself requires obviously so much more time to fully grasp. Multiple topics for possible future research came out of the discussions; regarding ActivityInfo and overcoming obstacles defined within humanitarian aid towards the practice of monitoring and information management. From my side, I’m looking forward to future lectures and possible future cooperation between student’s research and ActivityInfo to further enhance information management and (real-time) monitoring in humanitarian assistance!
Claire