Cross-cutting

Fund management entails the responsible and transparent award of large amounts of taxpayer capital to innovative projects around the world. The use of digital tools is invaluable in all elements of grant fund management. This includes establishing fund structures in compliant and accessible systems and in a cost efficient manner, designing fund procedures, conducting , as welldigital outreach and marketing as the operation and administration of the facility itself and the continuous monitoring and evaluation of fund performance.

Applying digital tools to these processes enables us to deliver value for our clients through efficiency while ensuring that the applicants and grantees have full confidence in the fairness of the allocation and management of funds. Large grant volumes make this accountability all the more important, which is why working within robust digital systems with built-in privacy and trust measures is a core part of the philosophy. Due diligence and remote monitoring of project activities is also of critical importance, and the use of digital tools can substantially ease the burden of monitoring activities. Finally, large quantities of information must be gathered, evaluated, and stored securely in a cost-efficient manner. It is critical to have stable and secure platforms for this purpose.

• Digital platforms for managing the full grant cycle and automating the processes, reducing administrative burden for grantees;
• Development of state-of-the-art secure cloud-based databases storing structured and unstructured data (e.g., SmartME platform);
• Digital-based outreach and marketing to grantees and wider target audiences, for example online videos, social media strategies;
• Developing digital inclusive and secure solutions tailored to grantees and drawing on our in-depth knowledge of the sectors, country contexts including low-bandwidth environments;
• Using AI to automate the process of drawing insights from grantee reporting and monitoring data; and
• Innovative use of digital tools for conducting due diligence at the appraisal stage and real-time grantee monitoring and evaluation during grantee implementation.

The exponential growth of digital data and technologies over the past few years is transforming the way MEL data is collected, analysed and shared. Key trends and opportunities across the evaluation cycle include: (1) Growth in the amount of existing digital data we can draw from in MEL assignments, reducing the costs associated with collecting new data (e.g. using website content, digital documents and administration records, satellite data), (2) Easier and lower cost of collecting and storing data with digital technologies (e.g. web-scaping, speech-to-text translation, APIs), (3) Improvements in the ability to analyse digital data and automate analyses using machine-learning and software engineering, and (4) Emergence of online MEL management information system (MIS) platforms, dashboards and web-based applications (e.g. Power-BI and Python Dash), which support real-time decision making and adaptive management.

• Full range of data collection services such as web-extraction, Earth observation, phone surveys (text and enumerator-based);
• Thought-leaders in the responsible application of cutting-edge natural language processing tools for MEL, including the new breed of pre-trained generative large language models on which ChatGPT is built;
• Advanced data analytics services ranging from machine learning (with text, image data), causal inference (quasi-experimental), forecasting and optimisation;
• Interactive online platforms, advice on using off-the-shelf solutions and development of bespoke solutions that automate data collection, analysis and communication processes;
• Digital-data governance-related advisory services, providing advisory services on data quality, privacy, inclusion and ethics;
• Training and capacity building for evaluators and evaluation commissioners; and
• Tailored data science support to impact investors and ESG reporting.