Development practitioners in the Monitoring and Evaluation sector are not only expected to use these project management tools to display status of activities and outputs of interventions, but also leverage the opportunities provided by advancements in data analytics and visualization to enable decision makers to identify the exact nature of gaps in implementation and take critical decisions related to implementation and funding priorities and strategies. The course introduces different monitoring frameworks (the core course focuses on results based monitoring alone) that address the diversity of interventions and the needs of stakeholder from monitoring systems, develop comprehensive indicator matrices that measure critical implementation components and develop monitoring systems for real world development interventions. The course prepares students to use technological advances for improving implementation of development interventions. It follows the integrated approach of humanistic inquiry and problem solving by engaging students to critically understand development interventions and their potential effects while at the same time, building their skills in developing monitoring tools and analyzing data emanating from them.

This workshop-style elective course uses Microsoft Power Bi, an interactive data visualization software to develop monitoring dashboards for development interventions. Through hands-on exercises students will learn to identify parameters that are critical in the implementation of development schemes, develop indicators for their measurement and use data visualization techniques to present monitoring information to decision makers.