MERL Tech Tool Spotlight: Reduced Access Analytical Methods
This blog post was written by Hanna Camp, an NLP CoP member and Director of MEL Technologies in the Evidence & Learning Unit at Mercy Corps.
Increasingly, humanitarian and development organizations find themselves implementing in contexts where conflict, natural disasters, political instability, or other factors have restricted or even removed their ability to physically reach affected populations.
In these environments, traditional monitoring methods may be insufficient to fully understand the program’s progress and make adaptive decisions. Reduced Access Analytical Methods (RAAM) and the RAAM Toolkit can help address this challenge.
Humanitarian and development program implementers frequently know that innovative use of MERL Tech could provide information and insight not available through traditional monitoring. However, they often lack practical guidance on how to do this.
Mercy Corps developed the RAAM toolkit to support program teams to leverage advanced MERL Tech and implement a menu of qualitative and quantitative methods that can produce useful information in wildly diverse contexts. The toolkit focuses on five methods (context mapping, rumor tracking, remote sensing, data triangulation, and transaction analysis) that can be deployed depending on the context and informational needs.
The RAAM toolkit has been used it to:
- map conflict trends for distribution planning
- remotely assess IDP shelter needs
- map and assess the lingering impact of a natural disaster on livelihoods in remote villages
- analyze patterns of voucher redemption among program participants in regions where the program is not allowed to conduct post-distribution monitoring
At its core, the RAAM toolkit is intended to help implementers address technical and managerial challenges when trying to use advanced MERL Tech, including low skill levels, the absence of clear analytical objectives connected to program outcomes, limited cross-departmental information sharing, vague or unrealistic expectations for analysts, poorly-thought-out timelines, and insufficient use of analytical findings.
RAAM’s heavy emphasis on tackling managerial barriers helps users to work practically in their context by systematically assessing the resources they have and the feasibility of different methods, establishing cross-departmental consensus on program monitoring gaps, and designing realistic plans for analytics. These steps, while non-technical, are critical to empowering reduced access MERL Tech to make the most of their data.
The toolkit is open-source and free to use, and Mercy Corps is eager to participate in ongoing conversations about how to leverage non-traditional data and analytical methods to monitor programs in reduced access.
Download the toolkit to learn more about the methods and consult case studies to see examples of how RAAM is used in different contexts.
The RAAM toolkit is made possible by the support of the American People through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance. The contents of the toolkit are the sole responsibility of Mercy Corps and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID or the United States Government. For questions or feedback, contact mel@mercycorps.org.