MERL Tech Johannesburg

We’re excited to organize MERL Tech Jozi — our first MERL Tech conference on the African continent. MERL Tech Jozi offers a space for the South African MERL and tech communities as well as those working across the continent and the globe to gather and share experiences, learning and insights and to develop new collaborations related to MERL and technology!

Digital data and new media and information technologies are changing monitoring, evaluation, research and learning (MERL). The past five years have seen technology-enabled MERL growing by leaps and bounds. From adaptive management and ‘developmental evaluation’; to faster, higher quality data collection; to remote data gathering through sensors and self-reporting by mobile; to big data and social media analytics; to story-triggered methodologies —  the field is in constant flux with emerging methods, tools and approaches.

Alongside these new initiatives we are seeing increasing documentation and assessment of technology-enabled MERL initiatives. Good practice guidelines and new frameworks are emerging and agency-level efforts are making new initiatives easier to start, build on and improve. The swarm of ethical questions related to these new methods and approaches has spurred greater attention to areas such as responsible data practice and the development of policies, guidelines and minimum ethical frameworks and standards for digital data.

Championing the above is a growing and diversifying community of MERL practitioners, assembling from a variety of fields; hailing from a range of starting points; espousing different core frameworks and methodological approaches; and representing innovative field implementers, start-ups and social enterprises, data scientists, independent evaluators, those at HQ that drive and promote institutional policy and practice, and donor agencies who support and often shape this work and the strategic areas related to it.

At MERL Tech Jozi, we’ll discuss all this and more! You’ll have the chance to meet, learn, and debate with 75 of your MERL Tech peers and to see live demos of new tools and approaches to MERL.