Building Capacity to Use Earth Observations: Best Practices for Monitoring Programmatic Progress

Current and future decision makers in the U.S. and developing countries need skills to access and apply Earth science for societal benefit. NASA's Applied Sciences' Capacity Building Program (CBP) offers training, project collaboration, and decision support tool co-development to decision-makers through three program elements called ARSET, DEVELOP, and SERVIR. With a portfolio that includes multiple capacity building approaches, it is important to monitor progress over time to assess impact and identify improvements. The diversity of activities requires a monitoring approach that tracks overall impact as well as the impacts of individual program elements. Building on ongoing element-level monitoring, CBP recently established a set of overarching standardized targets, identified indicators for each target, and developed a methodology to collect the data across the program. This presentation will include program and element case studies highlighting the capacity building approaches and current practices for monitoring progress and assessing impact.