USAID provides a diverse array of geospatial resources internally and to other U.S. government agencies and partners abroad. While some of this resource delivery is straightforward measurement and assessment support, much of it is highly technical in nature, rendering effective evaluation challenging. Over the last several years, the E3 Analytics and Evaluation Project has worked with multiple USAID operating units to review and evaluate a variety of the Agency’s geospatial resource provision, including custom maps and geographic information system products, satellite-derived data sets, geospatial tools, geographic emergency response information, and the analysis of complex Earth observation data.

Although the tasks required to evaluate these types of assistance share some common characteristics, the questions and objectives of the evaluations USAID commissioned under the Project have varied widely. Project evaluation teams have employed a variety of methodologies to answer complex questions around the delivery, use, and value of these geospatial resources and services.

• How are the resources being used? To unlock the (expected and unexpected) ways that the geospatial products and assistance provided by the USAID-NASA SERVIR program were being used, the Project’s performance evaluation conducted tracer studies. The Project team used these tracer studies to develop nine country-specific case studies of SERVIR’s resource provision.
• Did the resources match the requests? As part of an evaluation of the interagency agreement between USAID and the U.S. Department of Energy, the Project team used a process mapping exercise to identify opportunities for improvement in the resource development timeline.
• Who is using the resources? During the SERVIR evaluation, the Project team used social network analysis to understand which actors in the disaster response community were receiving or sharing the custom maps that USAID’s local partners were creating in response to landslides and floods.
• Are the resources making a difference? Through key informant interviews and a most significant change exercise, the Project team is reviewing assistance efforts by USAID’s GeoCenter to understand what factors make some types of assistance more useful than others.
• What are the resources worth? During the SERVIR evaluation, the Project team used direct measurement of benefits and a contingent valuation choice experiment to calculate the value of specific geospatial resources and capture which aspects of those resources were most valuable to their users.

Top Photo: Database officer from the Kenya National Drought Management Authority discusses their drought early warning system. Credit: Isaac Morrison/MSI, A Tetra Tech Company