The Evaluation of Complex Development Interventions in the Age of Big Data1
The advent of big data and its potential applications to monitoring and evaluation (M&E) have stirred a mix of excitement and skepticism in the M&E community. To the external observer, it seems “traditional” M&E methods and actors—with their focus on surveys, pre-post comparison, and administrative data collection—have not evolved sufficiently to leverage the potential of big data to yield insights on complex interventions and systems.
Advances have certainly happened; the term M&E 2.0 (Docking, 2013), for instance, was coined to describe how advances in technology can help address some of the challenges in M&E ...
Evaluation
