Use of e-health, or electronic information technologies, has spread to cities and remote villages worldwide. Countries such as Rwanda are activating nationwide e-health networks. The Rockefeller Foundation's month-long 2008 conference Making the eHealth Connection: Global Partners, Local Solutions accelerated this process. Conference participants proposed global partnerships, health technology solutions based on local needs, cross-border interoperability, leveraging current open-source networks, and shared informatics systems; they achieved progress on a shared, cross-border understanding of e-health solutions and policy. Early steps toward furthering these goals include creation of a new organization, the mHealth Alliance, to coordinate efforts, but collaborative investments are needed to usher in the promise of e-health.

ICT is being rapidly introduced into development evaluation. Evaluators need to keep abreast of these important evolutions in the field in order to stay current and continue shaping the future of development work through their practice. ICT is helping to resolve some age-old issues that evaluators face, especially in terms of time, resources and data quality constraints. At the same time, the introduction of ICTs into evaluation brings a series of new ethical, political and methodological challenges that evaluators need to address. The article also weighs the potential opportunities for ICT to strengthen equity and empowerment-focused evaluation against concerns that these new technologies could result in more 'extractive' approaches whereby it becomes easier for international agencies and donors to collect information remotely thereby reducing the ability of local communities and civil society to participate in the development dialogue. KeywordsEvaluation, equity and social exclusion, information and communication technology (ICT), threats to validity, impacts of mobile phones on women

Traditional social sector and international development organizations have prioritized measuring the impacts of their work for decades. Understanding the ways in which they are bringing about change or helping people and communities has long been part of the traditional social sector ethos. And, accountable to taxpayers, funders, and a diligent global community, these organizations have long felt the pressure for demonstrating tangible results. Consequently, most international development and social sector organizations-whether government agencies, philanthropic, multilateral, or nongovernmental organizations-have embraced a practice of robust measurement and evaluation and invested in the processes, systems, tools, capacity building, and partnerships necessary for assessing the progress and outcomes of their work. Beginning around 2007, the world began to witness the proliferation of new players into the social impact scene. The emergence of new actors dedicated to using market forces and capital markets for social good-such as impact investors, for example-has dramatically increased the pool of funding available to solve complex social problems. Current estimates of assets under management for impact investing range from US$ 114 billion dollars (Global Impact Investing Network, 2017) to upward of a trillion dollars (Paynter, 2017). The types of impact investments similarly vary-ranging from direct investments into social enterprises by fund managers representing high net worth individuals to socially responsible and sustainable investing by large institutional investors. The announcement of the Ford Foundation to invest one billion dollars in mission-related investments over the next decade represents the single largest investment to date. With a dual focus of generating good at the same time as financial returns, market actors, specifically impact investors, have fundamentally disrupted the old way of doing business.

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