MERL Tech DC 2019

While “Big data” is the everyday currency of data scientists, it often seems like a mystery box to many evaluators. The prospect of new data sources might be exciting, but it can be challenging to understand their place in evaluation. As digital technologies become more firmly fixed in everyday life, big data is increasingly leveraged for decision making and policy decisions but has been relatively little used in monitoring and evaluation.

This trend is shifting, however, and more M&E practitioners are increasingly exploring the use of big data - and many more are curious. This session will review these trends as well as frame a new vision for the future. Drawing on a review of recent MERL Tech conferences, the session will provide an overview of the ways in which the MERL Tech community has used big data in the past few years, and the ways in which data scientists and evaluators are starting to work together. The session will also turn toward promising new ways big data is being used to better evaluate tech and ICT4D programmes, identifying case studies which bring big data principles to life. It will also identify some of the gaps and promising areas that have not yet been explored. Special focus will be made to ethics, privacy and security. In order to responsibly use big data, evaluators must also consider the source of data, ways in which community members could be at risk if big data is used or big data sets are combined in which compromise at-risk populations.