Tuesday 15.30-16.30 (Passmore Edwards Room)

The ultimate IM consortia battle: challenge or opportunity, pick your side!  Maeve de France, CartONG, Lisa Daoud, Solidarités International, Saffi Jones, HelpAge International (ALERT Consortium)
Consortia usually generate a mix of fantasy and fear: they are seen as a great practice for aid coordination and harmonization and are encouraged by humanitarian organisations’ headquarters and donors, yet they sometimes add additional challenges, especially in terms of information and data management. In this session, three humanitarian workers with experience in IM in consortia will lead an intense battle to answer the burning question: what are the challenges and way forward when working in consortium?

Session Details:

The objective of the session is to share experiences and opinions on information management in consortia and to enhance learning on best practices. At the end of the session, participants will have learnt about a few challenges and opportunities that consortia entail in terms of information management and they will have discussed their own challenges and constraints.

At the beginning of the session, two teams will be formed. They will compete to decide if consortia bring about more challenges or opportunities in information and data management. Each participant will be given a change to share his/her ideas and concerns.

The three great presenters will also share their views and advice to guide the discussion on the following considerations: human resources (do we need mutualised resources and which ones?), budget (do we need extra lines?), tools (data collection, management, analysis, visualization etc.), strategies, roles and responsibilities etc.

This session will be particularly helpful for people and organizations having an experience in consortia or about to get involved in one. The presenters will offer a mix of H2H technical inputs and humanitarian field experience.

Come along, it will be fun and insightful!

Session Leads:

Maeve de France, Information Management Project Manager for CartONG. Maeve worked for 5 years in the private sector as a GIS project manager before shifting to the humanitarian field, where she works as Information Management project manager for CartONG- a french non-profit organisation committed to furthering the use of mapping, mobile data collection and information management to improve decision-making for emergency relief and development programmes around the world. More on CartONG here.

Saffi Jones, MEL Officer for HelpAge. Saffi is the MEL Officer on the ALERT emergency preparedness project. ALERT is an information management system and inter-agency platform that improves disaster preparedness to improve response. The transparency of the platform enables response teams, decision makers and donors to monitor and evaluate real-time data establishing a clear accountability mechanism for implementing emergency response. ALERT has been developed by a consortium of seven humanitarian organisations and academia (Oxfam International, Islamic Relief, Handicap International, HelpAge International, Concern Worldwide, Care International and Coventry University) and has included design consultation with more than 20 other NGOs. More about the Alert project here.

Lisa Daoud, MEAL Advisor at SOLIDARITES INTERNATIONAL. Lisa has a political science background and is particularly concerned about supporting implementing teams to optimise their information processes and actually measure the change their contribute to. She worked in three different countries (Cote d’Ivoire, Sudan and Lebanon), implementing projects and building on efficient M&E systems. Since August 2015, she is global MEAL Advisor for SOLIDARITES INTERNATIONAL, a humanitarian organisation that aims at proving crisis affected populations with essential basic services in about 15 countries. She designs and improves guidelines in M&E and accountability and spends half of her time travelling from a humanitarian response to another to support field teams in their daily work. More on Solidarites here.