Tostan
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Region: West Africa
Organization Type: NGO
Verticals: Education, Environmental Sustainability, Economic Empowerment, Governance, Health
Solutions: Program/Project Management, Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL), Grant Management
Products: Amp Impact, Feedback Survey (Google Forms), CommCare, OpenFN integration, Salesforce Platform
THE ORGANIZATION
The core of Tostan’s work is the Community Empowerment Program, which is a three-year education program that facilitates community-led development and social progress. As Tostan was born to listen to community needs by being inclusive and responsive, having a secure and open feedback loop across the organization – from the grassroots to the grantmakers – always remains a key priority.
“Tostan was born to listen and give voice to feedback. Learning from data is our DNA and strong feedback loops have been key for improving our programs over the last 30 years. Technology helps supplement this DNA to enhance what we’re doing, improve the quality of the data we’re collecting, and scale programs in the communities we serve.”
– Elena Bonometti, Tostan’s CEO
THE CHALLENGE
Tostan began its operations 30 years ago with limited technical support, which inevitably led to organizational data silos. The data disintegration affected Tostan’s workforce as valuable insight wasn’t reaching the people who needed it. For instance, vital information that could help inform programmatic changes and improvements was trapped with one person or team, producing misinformed teams at the grassroots and lack of transparency with the donors.
In 2016, Tostan implemented CommCare, a custom mobile platform built by Dimagi, to automate data collection from the field, minimize errors from manual processing, and expedite monitoring and evaluation (M&E).
Moreover, for a medium-size organization like Tostan, it was crucial to stay lean and efficient, as they were building the foundation for scaling. Thus, the goal of Tostan’s digital transformation journey was to have the technology amplify the impact happening in one location, as well as successfully replicating it in different geographies through local adaptation.
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THE SOLUTION: COMBINING GRANT AND M&E DATA
“People needed to understand and appreciate how much the quantitative data was going to enhance feedback loops in a way that would allow us to make better-informed decisions.”
– Elena Bonometti, Tostan’s CEO
THE TRANSFORMATION JOURNEY
In the following step, Vera’s team mapped the monitoring and evaluation data system needs and designed a data model as a foundation for the desired system functionality. Subsequently, in the implementation phase, Vera Solutions configured the Salesforce Lightning instance along with the Amp Impact platform according to the system design. In this stage of the journey, Vera’s team focused on customizing the platform and securely migrating historical data.
Furthermore, Vera Solutions continues to provide in-depth training for the end-users to ensure effective change management while keeping the core organizational goals in mind.
