Data, Accountability and Commercialisation. Working with NGO data to enhance downwards accountability in contexts of livelihood change.

This project has two dimensions. First it uses data held by Micaia, a development NGO that works in Mozambique, to explore the expected and unexpected consequences of commercialisation of natural resources. Micaia has been centrally involved in raising farm gate prices of natural resources (honey, baobab) and improving the management of those resources. We seek to use and expand Micaia's data better to understand how this work can be most beneficial to rural Mozambicans.

Second, it tackles a key problem facing development NGOs. These NGOs should be downwardly accountable to the people whom they exist to serve. And they have to be upwardly accountable to their funders. This tension is one of the central attributes of the development NGO sector globally.

A central component of this tension is data. The ability to know things about other people's lives is fundamental to accountability, whether with respect to project performance, changes in poverty, prosperity and wellbeing, community institutions, infrastructure and so on. Data provide power over funds, lives and organisations.

The challenge this project explores therefore is how development NGOs can collect, store and present data in ways that facilitate downwards accountability, while also meeting funders' requirements. It builds on a previously funded secondary data initiative with Micaia. That project worked on data management plans and organisation to marshal previously collected data from development projects and businesses. We will work in this project on new forms and modalities of data collection that tackle the dilemmas of accountability.

Specifically this project explores four challenges. First, it will examine how data management and data collection can respond both to immediate funder needs (on how money has been spent and to what end) while also maintaining longer term monitoring and communicating key aspects of prosperity that matter most to communities. Co-ordinating and integrating these aspects of data collection is not straight forward. Yet maintaining the latter - tracking aspects of change that communities are most interested in - is central to downwards accountability. The second challenge is that these data collection systems must be robust and agile enough to respond to unforeseen changes. These can be common, particularly where projects are successful. They can present new aspects of community life and prosperity that communities and organisations will wish to track. Third, we will consider how these data might be effectively integrated with currently publicly available data in order that they can be most effectively and generally used.

We will be exploring these issues with respect to Micaia's work in natural resource management and commercialisation. Micaia has set up a baobab products company which provides substantial revenues to rural women where few revenue earning opportunities are available. It has a longer established honey company which works over a larger area. In addition it has worked on several projects on different aspects of natural resource management and institutional support. In combination these activities have driven substantial welcome change. But tracking that change and using those data to inform the appropriate entities, as well as capturing unforeseen developments - such changing gender relations within households that new revenues cause - is not straight forward. This project will take on this task. That is the fourth challenge.

The outputs of this work will be better data on the dynamics of rural villages in Mozambique where Micaia works. These will inform feedback to communities, local government and Micaia's plans and projects. In the second it will generate protocols and systems of using data to enhance downward accountability that will be useful to development NGOs more widely. Finally we will also provide insights into the consequences of commercialisation of natural resources.

Who will benefit from this research?
This research will benefit:
- Rural communities in Manica and Tete provinces in Mozambique for whom natural resources are an important component of their livelihoods.
- Development NGOs who are seeking to use their data to enhance their downward accountability.
- Governments and other stakeholders who work on development data who seek to integrate a broader range of data sources into their decision making.

How will they benefit from this research?
Local communities will benefit because we will learn more about how commercialisation of natural resources differentially benefits rural groups. We will also learn more about the unforeseen consequences of these changes and how unwelcome change can be mitigated. This will particularly pertain to the gendered consequences of commercialisation on livelihoods and domestic economies within families.

Development NGOs will benefit because we will learn more about how NGO data can be managed and communicated in ways which enhance downwards accountability, and how they can respond to unforeseen changes that necessitate new data collection needs.

Governments and other stakeholders will benefit because of the new data that we will make available and because of the learning about data integration that we will enable.

What will be done to ensure that they have the opportunity to benefit from this activity?
We will feedback to rural communities and local government directly through community level meetings as well as through on-going relationships with permanent Micaia staff. Findings will also be incorporated into Micaia's ongoing and forthcoming projects and work of their honey and baobab companies.

We will communicate directly with development NGOs and government through the project website, blogs and one to one meetings. We will also hold a stakeholder meeting in Chimoio to review learning from this project. The PI, PDRA and Micaia staff will also be working at higher level with national government officers and multilateral organisation staff. We will be communicating lessons from this project to them through established working relationships. For example Nuvunga, MICAIA's director, is a Steering Committee Member of The Forest Dialogue, a global network working on land and forestry resources, hosted by Yale University, USA. Research results could be shared at these international conferences, which include key academic and non-academic institutions related to this field.