How can donors use the crowd to monitor projects?

How can donors use the crowd to monitor projects

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The recent million t-shirts debate has shown the power of crowd-sourcing for appraising projects. Do you have ideas on how to improve project implementation?

This photo for an AusAID project to distribute 500,000 textbooks in Papua New Guinea got me thinking. How do we know if the books reach the 3,400 or so schools and the pupils?

The containers arrived on two ships, one unloading its precious cargo in Lae and the other in Port Moresby.

From here the books will be sorted, with each primary and community school in the country receiving a set of 159 books.

This is a massive logistical operation,' said Acting head of AusAID in PNG, Robin Scott-Charlton.

Getting the books to PNG is the easy part. From Lae and Port Moresby the books will be broken into smaller amounts and sent to every provincial capital from where they will be distributed to all primary and community schools in each province.'

This is a common problem that donors face. It's relatively easy to procure good and services, but will they reach recipients?

It got me wondering if donors are missing a trick why not ask the public whether they got the service or not? (After all the US defense department got a staggering response when it asked the public to find 10 red balloons)

In the above example,AusAID wants the textbooks to reach the intended recipients. And schools, parents (and hopefully children) want to receive the textbooks.

So how can people be brought into the monitoring process?

New technologies for crowd-sourcing significantly bring down the transactions costs for collecting and mashing' data from many stakeholders. Examples include SMS-based systems (e.g.Ushahidi's crisis reporting), smart-phone systems (e.g.Kenyan crop insurance) and web-based systems (e.g.eMoksha's Fix Our City). What other examples are there?

So a question for us all to consider, how would you go about designing a simple platform for the Papua New Guinea public to provide reliable feedback on whether kids have received their textbooks? What's the best solution?

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