The safety and wellbeing of project staff must always be accorded high priority. In high-threat environments, there may be a need to withdraw or drastically reduce the number of international and sometimes national staff from the field, and require that program monitoring be done at a more secure location, which is often different from where the project is being implemented.

For several years, project managers, especially those implementing programs in high-risk environments, have approached remote monitoring as a substitute for traditional performance monitoring. However, remote monitoring is a robust and cost-effective approach that yields comparable, if not occasionally better results than traditional monitoring. With the COVID-19 pandemic, and many organizations compelled to withdraw or drastically reduce field staff, there has been a rush to implement remote monitoring with little preparation, often leading to mixed results.

A critical component of remote monitoring is mobile data collection (MDC) whether by smartphone apps, SMS messaging, or voice response (IVR), which has enabled many organizations compelled to withdraw or drastically reduce field staff in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to continue to collect and manage data. By moving from paper to mobile, organizations have been able to leverage a robust new data collection platform that is faster, cheaper, generates higher quality data, and is easier to integrate with existing systems.

Triangulation
With remote monitoring, it is often necessary to employ triangulation, that is, the analysis of data from three or more sources obtained by different methods. With triangulation, results can be corroborated, and the weakness or bias of any of the methods or data sources can be compensated for by the strengths of another, thereby increasing the validity and reliability of results.