Information Management (IM), also known as Programme Data Management, has been a topic of growing importance in the humanitarian aid and international development sector since the early 2000s. It is however still a relatively misunderstood area of expertise and much work remains to build aid actors' Information Management capacities, in order to improve the quality of their projects.
Different actors have been sharing the Information Management resources they have published online on their own organisation’s website, but a single platform aiming at centralising them in one place to render the life of Information Management practitioners easier did not exist.
This portal was therefore created to help local, national and international humanitarian aid and development actors build their capacities in Information Management by making available French and English technical and methodological resources, training material, studies and lessons learned papers, and by promoting learning and knowledge sharing.
The portal is available in both English and French, it is possible to switch the language of the portal interface by clicking on the "Select Language" button in the menu at the top. Please note that the French interface is generated using a Google Translate plug-in. The French translations may thus not always be entirely reliable.
This portal is composed of three main sections:
- The resource library allows everyone to access and share Information Management reports, guidance, case studies, training material, benchmarkings, tutorials and more.
- The blog section allows everyone to access relevant opinion pieces and technical-oriented contributions. It also helps centralise comprehensive sets of practical resources by key topics such as the Mobile Data Collection toolkit or the Data Visualisation Toolkit.
- The event section allows everyone to access and share information about events related to Information Management in the aid sector, understood in the broad sense (that is to say including subtopics of Information Management, such as Geographic Information Systems, data processing, Mobile Data Collection, or larger topics such as data culture, responsible data, etc.) and also considering a cross-cutting approach (such as IM and Monitoring and Evaluation, for instance).
The portal is brought to you by CartONG, a French H2H (humanitarian to humanitarian) NGO specialised in Information Management and whose mission is to put data at the service of humanitarian, development and social action projects.
This initiative benefits from the kind contribution of several partners of CartONG, in particular Terre des hommes, who have co-produced with CartONG and/or agreed to share a significant number of relevant resources about Information Management via the MDC-Toolkit.org public portal that CartONG had built for their teams over the years (of which the content was transferred to the portal prior to its launch in June 2021).
We invite organisations that wish to join the conversation and would like to actively contribute to the Information Management Resource Portal to contact us by info [at] im-portal [dot] org (email).
The development of the Information Management Resource Portal was funded by the AFD (Agence Française de Développement) as part of a three-year project aiming at structuring the francophone aid sector on the topic of Information Management. Click here for more information. It also benefited from the support of the H2H Fund of the H2H Network, which is supported by UK Aid from the UK government, and who has (co-)financed a number of resources available on the portal. In order to ensure the sustainability of the Information Management Resource Portal over the years and potentially expand its reach in the future, we are interested in further funding/support for this initiative.
Last but not least, any contribution from aid actors wishing to help us identify and share relevant resources or information about upcoming events is welcome. The same goes for blog post ideas by guest contributors (see a few recommendations here)!
