Join Us at this Year’s SAMEA Conference to Learn About Using AI in the Design and MERL of Social and Behaviour Change Interventions!
Join us in Johannesburg at this year’s South African Monitoring and Evaluation Association’s (SAMEA) conference, October 7-11 where members of the Natural Language Processing Community of Practice (NLP-CoP) will be running a session on the use of Large Language Models and NLP for digital audience segmentation and social and behavior change.
Let us know in the comments if you’ll be attending – we’d love to find time to meet up with any NLP-CoP members who are going to be at the conference!
Date: Friday, October 11, 2024
Time: 9:00 – 16:30 South African Standard Time
This workshop was developed as a learning “bootcamp” for MERL managers and practitioners who want to use new technologies (AI-based approaches in particular) to improve performance, impact and MERL activities of their SBC programs but are not sure where to start. It is designed to take participants through a step-by-step process of developing robust, reliable digital segmentation of audiences or target populations using elements of traditional and digital data mining, and AI-based approaches like NLP and LLMs. It will explore how to measure engagement and impact of digital SBC interventions and the elements to include within an M&E framework.
The workshop will be facilitated by Nicola Harford, Co-Chair for the NLP-CoP SBC Working Group, Anastasia Mirzoyants, Bryson Mwakuwona, and Ronald Musizvingoza.
Don’t miss the other Tech-Enabled MERL Sessions at SAMEA!
The wider conference offers many other sessions that may be of interest to the MERL Tech and NLP communities including:
- Leveraging AI for Enhanced Data Analysis in the Love Alliance
- Real-Time Monitoring Tool and its Use in Enabling Evidence-Driven Social-Development Programs to Promote Wellbeing of Vulnerable Children and Their Families
- Insights and Lessons from Virtual Evaluation Practice in South Africa
- Digital Monitoring and Evaluation Knowledge Management/Results Tracking Systems to Improve Evidence-Based Governance: the Case of Ghana and Uganda
- The Electronic M&E System for the Social Development Sector
- Using Digital Tools for Better Monitoring and Evaluation: the Propel Example in Africa
This year’s conference theme is, “Vuca-Vuka! Catalysing Change Through Monitoring and Evaluation.” It highlights the necessity of proactively responding to our world’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) nature. The uncertainties and volatilities of the last several years call for us to wake up – Siyavuka sisebenzele ikusasa elingcono.
SAMEA conference organizers hope this year’s conference will inspire and equip participants to adopt adaptive, collaborative and innovative approaches to their M&E practice that will help them collectively steer South Africa towards equitable and sustainable development.
As noted by the organizers, “We aim to “unconference” this conference by integrating elements that foster co-creation, peer-to-peer learning, and community-building. To enrich the conference with an indigenous African heartbeat, the conference will also be infused with the art of storytelling as critical knowledge sharing. The conference will feature a mix of co-creative mini-hackathons or mini-workshops, oral presentations, panel discussions, World Café sessions, poster presentations, and lightning talks.”
The programme will run for five days and include a mix of plenaries, parallel sessions, and workshops.