MERL Tech DC 2019

For nearly ten years, the Principles for Digital Development have served as a set of living guidelines intended to help practitioners succeed in applying digital technologies to development programs. The MERL Tech community have embraced the Digital Principles, particularly in the design of programs. In more recent years, we are beginning to see more adaptation by the community in transforming the Digital Principles from theory to practice. We have also observed an increased demand for evaluation tools built on the foundation of good practice championed by the Digital Principles.

Most notably, a group of global health donors recently collaborated on the Digital Health Investment Review Tool (DHIRT), which enables donors to incorporate the Digital Principles when creating requests for solicitations, defining contract language, and evaluating proposals for grant funding and software procurement. Complementing this work, DIAL has worked with TechChange to build a sector-agnostic Digital Principles Maturity Matrix tool to assess how practitioners and organizations are living the Digital Principles, both in program design and implementation, and provide a road map to improvement and uptake.

This panel will discuss the challenges in transforming a framework into an evaluative methodology and experiences and findings in applying these open and adaptable tools. The group will discuss how they applied the Digital Principles themselves in their development approach and use, and we will encourage the audience to reflect upon how to measure their organization’s compliance with the Digital Principles.