At every stage of a cluster life-cycle and whichever the type of emergency, activity reporting is one of the key main tasks of the IMO both in terms of internal tracking of activities to be able to properly coordinate among partners, but also with regards to requirements vis-à-vis OCHA. Tracking activities is usually done through a matrix* (depending on the context , 4W, 5W, etc.) although the way partners report and/or the cluster chooses to collect activity reporting data may differ.
Once the datasets are populated with the information necessary to track activities, it is recommended to communicate this information in a way that is useful to partners to facilitate their own bilateral coordination. Shelter Clusters have done this through static or interactive dashboards at the local level, skype groups, factsheets, or even simple gap analysis through excel. One such example may be the coordination of winterization response. In Ukraine, the Subnational Shelter Cluster created a dashboard in Tableau, while in NW Syria a simple gap analysis was done to compare needs assessment data with the activities reported by partners. A damage database was also exchanged offline at Subnational level to facilitate coordination of coverage of repairs to damaged homes all along the 467 km long contact line.
*To note that although other tools exist to track activities, matrices in an excel format continue to be a safe and straightforward way to carry out activity tracking due to the ease of editing entries and quick way of producing analysis. Excel matrices are also efficient to roll-out both during sudden activation, and also in cases where there is a certain level of sensitivity with data, or access, which makes it challenging to keep track of progress though online platforms. Given the nature of shelter activities in some contexts, there may be a frequent need to edit planned or ongoing shelter figures throughout the construction season or after the construction season has finalized. Monitoring and evaluation of activities also may enable one to verify whether the completed activities match the coverage reported by partners. The ability to retroactively clean data is another advantage of the excel format compared to some online versions. Some clusters have found that kobo data entry incentivizes partners to report and helps keep data cleaner than partner excel entry. This is a hybrid version and enables the Cluster team to maintain autonomy over the editing and analysis of the data, while supporting partners to easily enter their activities. Other platforms do not enable such autonomy to retroactively edit activities that may have finalized over a year or more.
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