Industry Trends and Current Events

SurveyCTO is excited to participate in this year’s USAID Global Innovation Week as part of the Evidence & Innovation Day on September 28th in Washington D.C. USAID’s Global Innovation Week is a great opportunity to explore how the best ideas, innovations, and technologies are changing the way the U.S. Government, business, and philanthropy work together.

As the social enterprise sector grows, one of the more exciting vectors for innovation is financial. Coalitions such as the Impact Terms Project and organizations like Echoing Green are sharing resources and promoting new structures for funding double-bottom-line entities. Click here to read our post in collaboration with the Impact Terms Project.

MERL Tech UK was a small, intimate gathering by conference standards (just under 100 attendees), but jam-packed full of passion, accumulated wisdom, and practical knowledge. It's clear that technology is playing an increasingly useful role in helping us with monitoring, evaluation, accountability, research, and learning -- but it's also clear that there's plenty of room for improvement. As a technology provider, I walked away with both more inspiration and more clarity for the road ahead. Some highlights...

The Ministry of Agriculture in Haiti (Le Ministère de l’Agriculture, des Ressources Naturelles et du Développement Rural) recently collaborated with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) on two impact assessments in Haiti. We connected with Jery Rambao, the field coordinator for the study, and Sébastien Gachot, a rural development specialist at IDB, to learn more about their work.

The SurveyCTO team occasionally fields questions about how to keep projects running smoothly, even when, for example, the government shuts down the internet. Most recently, we've been hearing from users in Ethiopia who are struggling to manage government restrictions on accessing the internet.

Learn about SurveyCTO projects around the world - including The Sesame Street Hygiene Reach Study Survey in Nigeria, a bean baseline survey in Zimbabwe, a household water use survey in Kiribati, and more - in our August edition of SurveyCTO Photos from the Field.

We're kicking off a new series for the SurveyCTO blog - photos from our users around the world. This round, we're featuring submissions from the Philippines, Mozambique, Uganda, and more.

Thank you to everyone who joined us last week for the Dobility India launch party in Cambridge. It was great to see familiar faces and make new friends in the social impact and technology world. As Chris said in his remarks, we wouldn't be here without you, our amazing community of supporters and users!

Please join Dobility India for a panel discussion and party in celebration of our India launch. We will be discussing "Small data, big impact: Innovations and best practices in high-quality data collection" with local and global experts as we contribute to building a stronger community of organizations and individuals collecting quality data.

For a Masters in Public Policy course at Harvard Kennedy School, we wanted to shift a pandemic simulation from in-class to before-class. Read more to learn how we did it with SurveyCTO...