Building a custom monitoring and evaluation (M&E) portal for 2SCALE

2SCALE is the largest incubator for agribusiness in Africa. Working with a range of companies and farmer groups, 2SCALE enables farmers to increase their income while reducing harm to the environment. In order to streamline 2SCALE’s monitoring and evaluation efforts, Akvo built an M&E portal that combines data collection, indicator management and reporting tools into one elegant interface.

Above: One of 2SCALE's partnerships on vegetable production in Bamako. Photo credit: 2SCALE.


Partners

2SCALE

Akvo


Locations

Ethiopia

Ghana

Ivory Coast

Kenya

Mali

Nigeria

Burkina Faso

Niger


Sector

Agriculture


Services

Database integration

Website creation


Tools

Akvo Flow

Akvo RSR

The challenge

Monitoring and evaluation systems have many moving parts - from indicator definition to user management and reporting. These parts are often dealt with in isolation, resulting in increased investment and duplicated capacity building efforts. 2SCALE had an M&E plan, but with 60 projects each with a combination of common and unique indicators, they were finding it hard to get a good overview of the project and understand what was going on in the field. This made it difficult to monitor data collection, report on impact, and steer management decisions.

The partnership

Our partnership with 2SCALE started by gaining a thorough understanding of their technical needs based on their M&E plan and programme approach. Ultimately, they needed to digitise their M&E plan and they needed a data portal that would include:

  • A simple data entry system so that the data collection team can actively engage with the tool and keep data collection running smoothly.
  • A dataset tab for the M&E team so they can download per project, per country or overall and conduct quick analyses.
  • A sophisticated interface with compelling visuals so the programme director can easily see impact.
  • A partnership profile generator. If the team want to know more about a specific project in Kenya, for example, they just click a button and download pictures, narratives, and dashboards regarding that project or partner.

The 2SCALE monitoring and evaluation (M&E) portal

The change

The 2SCALE M&E data portal combines various data collection, indicator management and reporting tools. Users can enter data, view and download interactive visualisation dashboards, and create custom reports using one single interface. This allows M&E managers to report on their projects in an elegant and efficient way.