CIPE recently endorsed the Principles for Digital Development, a living guideline to help international development practitioners incorporate best practices into tech-enabled programs. CIPE is joining leading development and democracy strengthening organizations, including the World Bank and NDI, to learn from each other how to implement more human-centered, inclusive, and collaborative projects using information and communications technologies (ICTs).
The reason CIPE is endorsing the Principles for Digital Development is simple: as we move into the digital age, so too will our work. CIPE will increasingly focus more on supporting our partners become active participants in the digital economy, push for open data and transparency, and improve governance using ICTs. We’re already delving into this area, and a without a doubt CIPE’s work will continue to grow in the digital realm.
CIPE also plans to utilize technology to increase the use of real-time data to adjust programs based on results and close the gap between monitoring and evaluation cycles that traditionally are done only at project close, or even years later.
This approach will complement sharing of data (the “data revolution”), but promote data management best practices (now required by increasing number of donors) that are also responsible and respect stakeholders’ data privacy and confidentiality and promote justice and benefits the communities where we work. For this reason, CIPE is also working to utilize these M&E technology tools that build stakeholder feedback loops that share lessons learned, build local capacity and enhance local ownership over inclusive and accountable results.
To get started, CIPE will carefully examine how our existing code of conduct and policies align with the Principles, which are divided into nine pillars:
- Design with the User
- Understanding the existing ecosystem
- Design for scale
- Build for sustainability
- Be data driven
- Use open standards, open data, open source, and open innovation
- Reuse and improve
- Address privacy and security
- Be collaborative
Read more on each of the principles to understand how CIPE will benchmark itself to the global standards so that we’re respectful, humble, and mindful as CIPE explores digital development programming. In the coming months, we’ll share with you our lessons learned on the CIPE Development Blog and with the digital development community, so stay tuned.
Maiko Nakagaki is Program Officer for Global Programs at CIPE.
