M&E in Government: Data Quality in Theory and Practice

When considering data for monitoring and evaluation in government, quality comes up consistently as a challenge, whether we are considering administrative and survey data sources. What practices or standards can be introduced and institutionalized to improve the relevance reliability, accuracy, timeliness etc. of data collection? How can data collection architecture be designed to reduce perverse incentives and encourage learning, towards better outcomes? What experiences do we have to learn from? What cultural, normative or capacity shifts are required across government to ensure sustainability of such systems and practices? This session will explore these questions and attempt to arrive at feasible, actionable suggestions from which other developing and under-developed countries venturing into evaluation of their large development programmes could learn. .