Program Evaluation for Integrated Disaster Science Products in the Humanitarian Sector

Abstract:

Disaster risk management organizations are often in the market for integrated scientific products to support decision making around disaster response, especially around flood response. Such products include business intelligence dashboards, risk maps, and summary reports. However, it is difficult for the providers of integrated scientific products to track the specific decisions made through the use of the product during an emergency response or over an entire rainy season. Data providers can address this challenge by embracing tools used in traditional program evaluation, which can be deployed to effectively track the behavior of the end-users of integrated science products.

This session will explore how program evaluation can be leveraged to track how first responders have used decision support tools from Cloud to Street to more effectively respond to catastrophic flooding events in Sub-Saharan Africa. This session will introduce the basics of program evaluation for data providers with a focus on the logical framework approach. The flood monitoring decision support tool developed for the World Food Programme in the Republic of the Congo will be used as a case study to illustrate the efficacy of developing project-specific logical frameworks while deploying integrated scientific products.