In the DRC

ActivityInfo was originally developed in early 2009 for UNICEF’s Emergency Unit in the DRC. In late 2009, ActivityInfo was adopted as the NFI and Education Cluster’s information management platform in the DRC, and in 2010 OCHA began expanding ActivityInfo’s use to the remaining clusters in the DRC.

For questions regarding adopting ActivityInfo within your organisation in clusters in the DRC, please contact pknguessan [Email address: pknguessan #AT# unicef.org - replace #AT# with @ ], Information Management Officer UNICEF based in Goma, North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo.

For Cluster adoption outside DRC

ActivityInfo has been developed to face the challenges of coordinating, monitoring and reporting within large scale, multi-year, multi partner programs. The developers recognized the need for strengthening humanitarian information management within humanitarian action, and more specifically in situations as in the clusters, where multiple partners and stakeholders are working closely together.  Inter-agency cooperation and cluster activities can be enhanced with one tool for project monitoring and reporting. ActivityInfo seeks to facilitate easy reporting mechanisms, and improve the effectiveness of humanitarian response by allowing for improved targetting, accountability and partnership. Furthermore activities can be monitored in real-time and allow for more effective and timely relief operations.

For adopting ActivityInfo for your cluster, please contact activityinfo [Email address: activityinfo #AT# bedatadriven.com - replace #AT# with @ ].

By NGOs

ActivityInfo allows organisations and project managers to have an overview at any given time of its operations, based on its own indicators and requirements, even in the most chaotic environments. Using the database does not require special technical skills, since it is based on very simple excel-like entries, while fully integrating Geographic Information Systems.  ActivityInfo allows you to easily and quickly create tables, charts and maps based on the most recent data. You can review results over time, by geography, by partner, or some combination, and export the results to Word, PowerPoint or Excel. In most monitoring and reporting systems, monitoring is one directional. ActivityInfo provides value to enable monitoring of all sorts at every level within the organisation. Furthermore, ActivityInfo is concerned with continues data gathering instead of ex post research evaluations, allowing for real time monitoring and evaluation from any given location.

If your NGO is interested in adopting ActivityInfo for information management and monitoring, contact bedatadriven. ActivityInfo has been developed as open source software, under a GPL license, allowing anyone to use it and continue to enhance it by new features or additional programs. However bedatadriven can provide upon request a centralized hosted ActivityInfo service and take care of all system maintenance, database tuning and backup, and regular upgrades to the new versions of the software as they become available; freeing up your staff to focus on using ActivityInfo. Bedatadriven also assists your organization with a jumpstart in using ActivityInfo by including a  training, coaching and service packages. Please contact activityinfo [Email address: activityinfo #AT# bedatadriven.com - replace #AT# with @ ] for more information.

By Donors

Donors are often simply not in the position to offer constructive input into projects and programs because they have so little visibility of field realities, progress and outputs. ActivityInfo allows for indicator-based monitoring on progress and responses at any given time, and share them with others. ActivityInfo thereby makes real partnerships possible, between organisations and their counterparts, between a project site and their headquarters or between a field offices and and donors.

Activityinfo also helps improving the capacity of humanitarian organisations for analysis and decision regarding current needs and responses by its “real-time monitoring nature”, allowing quick responses. ActivityInfo provides secure information management within an organisation but also the possibility for organisations to quickly share information, with other humanitarian actors and donors, to improve humanitarian assistance through needs based proportional responses.

Furthermore, field staff often spend considerable time reporting and re-reporting the same results to donors and other stakeholders who each ask for slightly different indicators and format. With an ActivityInfo database in place, field staff enter detailed results and indicators once, as activities are implemented and stakeholders can access the data as needed. It furthermore allows for linking in to standardized reports, even on an automatic email basis.

Within the Democratic Republic of Congo, UNICEF has currently adopted ActivityInfo within RRMP (previously RMP and PEAR) and several clusters, whereby all actors involved are not required to attain to several reporting mechanisms, since ActivityInfo allows for real time monitoring and reporting. Additionally, standard reporting formats can be created by any database creator as well as a donor and data entries in the database will be automatically entered into these reports (feature online by January 2012).

For questions regarding adopting ActivityInfo as information, monitoring or reporting mechanism for you as a donor, please contact activityinfo [Email address: activityinfo #AT# bedatadriven.com - replace #AT# with @ ] for more information and an appointment for a presentation.

For use within UNICEF

If you want to adopt ActivityInfo for UNICEF operations and programs, please contact pknguessan [Email address: pknguessan #AT# unicef.org - replace #AT# with @ ], Information Management Officer UNICEF, based in Democratic Republic of Congo.

Current Users

If you are using ActivityInfo and require more assistance, please take a look at the resources page of this website. Tuturials will guide you in setting up and working with ActivityInfo, whereas how-to guides will assist you step-by-step in creating pivot tables, charts and maps. If you facing problems or bugs while working with the program, do not hesitate to use the “contact us” feature within the program at any time. If we are online we will get back to you immediately or email you as soon as we are.

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