MERL Tech DC 2019

ACDI/VOCA has been using touchless smartcards to track beneficiaries for over four years. As a result, through our USAID funded Agricultural Development and Value Chain Enhancement project (ADVANCE) in Ghana, we won the USAID 2017 Digi Award. ADVANCE was able to report on the benefits received by over unique 131,000 Ghanaian smallholder farmers with this technology. We have also been successfully using smartcards in Colombia within our USAID funded Emergency Response in Arauca project (ERA). However, we failed in integrating this technology in a few other projects, including in Kyrgyzstan.

These last four years, we were able to take stock and reflect on the pros and cons of this technology in different contexts. During the session, we will provide detailed explanation on how this technology works with live and interactive demonstration. We will share the lessons we learned, the success factors, and a decision tree that will help organizations determine whether smartcards are a good solution for their monitoring and evaluation (M&E) activities. Examples of factors include costs, local capacity, project activities scale, number of beneficiaries, project M&E database features, and where in the implementation cycle projects are. Furthermore, we will discuss alternative technological solutions that might be more accessible and less expensive for the cases where smartcards are less relevant.

At the end of the session, the audience will be familiar with the use of smartcards for Monitoring and Evaluation and will be able to map their way forward in the design of their next beneficiary tracking solution.