Update: IDEO and +Acumen are partnering to offer a free online course on Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation Last year I did a free design course from the University of Pennsylvania. The course wasn’t specifically for international development – most of the practical exercises were on designing a new type of ice-cream scoop. …

Supervision checklists are used during monitoring to verify if an activity has been implemented correctly. They can also be used to give feedback to the person running the activity to help them improve. Here are a few tips on how to design supervision checklists for international development / aid programs. You …

Supervision checklists are used during monitoring to verify if an activity has been implemented correctly. They can also be used to give feedback to the person running the activity to help them improve. For tips and advice, see our guide on how to write a supervision checklist. This template provides a general framework …

As the rest of the world is moving towards big data and cloud computing, so too is the development community. An Aid Information Management System (AIMS) is the latest buzzword for a piece of software that stores data on all your projects, budgets, activities and indicators. What can it do? AIMS come in …

In international development / global aid programs, ‘cost-effectiveness analysis’ is a term given to comparing the relative costs of achieving the same outcome using different activities. For example, if a program uses one-on-one outreach to promote antenatal care for pregnant women, and another program uses mass SMS to do the same …

At tools4dev we get a lot of emails from people who want to make a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system for their program, but don’t know where to start. If that sounds familiar then this guide is for you. Know your program Before you start work on the M&E system it’s important …

Note: A progress report is sometimes called a field report or a quarterly / six monthly report. Progress reports are used by a project team to update the donor or head office on the status of the project (for example, at the end of every quarter or 6 month period). There …

It used to be that finding national statistics was a time consuming business. You had to hunt through government reports, many of which were not available online, or were of dubious origin. You could spend days just trying to find a few numbers for the opening sentence of your proposal or presentation. These …

Download logframe template and example  Love them or hate them, logical frameworks (logframes) have become a staple of international development programs. Most donors will require one as part of your proposal, and it’s the first things an evaluator will ask for. Our logframe template is one of the most popular downloads on tools4dev. This …

Download the Gender Tools Gender is an important topic in international development / aid. Most donors ask you to explain how your project will address issues related to gender, and it can be difficult to know how to address that part of the proposal unless you’ve done a gender analysis. …