In early 2018, polio virus was detected in the sewers of Mogadishu, Somalia and the government moved quickly to vaccinate the country's children in order to prevent a potential outbreak. A vaccination campaign targeting more than 726,000 children was launched in the Banadir and Lower and Middle Shabelle regions. The campaign was carried out by some 3,500 staffers and Nafundi assisted by enabling real-time tracking of vaccination coverage using ODK. Read more.
Fayaz Jatoi is the Coordinator of the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) for Polio Eradication in Sindh, Pakistan. In this guest post, Fayaz describes why AFP surveillance is critical to polio eradication and how an SMS-based reporting system for private care provider helps. Read more.
This position has been filled. Thanks to everyone who applied! Read more.
This position has been filled. Thanks to everyone who applied! Read more.
This position has been filled. Thanks to everyone who applied! Read more.
Susan Tonks is the Typhoid Strategic Award Programme Manager at University of Oxford. She is responsible for coordination and delivery of a 24-month programme of typhoid surveillance at sites in Africa and Asia. In this guest post, Susan describes her team's work using ODK to collect data on more than 300,000 individuals in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Malawi to support the programme. Read more.
Frank Chege is the head of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) at the African Agricultural Technology Foundation. He has advised and supported M&E activities for a portfolio of 10 projects in 13 African countries, covering the access, adoption and deployment of appropriate agricultural technologies. In this guest post, he describes how Nafundi's training and tools have helped AATF's monitoring and evaluation efforts. Read more.
In 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced a new strategy for malaria control and elimination and a key goal was eliminating malaria in at least 10 countries by 2020. In the Eliminating Malaria report that WHO published, action-oriented surveillance data was noted as one of core needs. Read more.
Andrew Bell is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University. He studies the use of surveys, experimental games, and choice experiments to inform the development of agent-based models of agricultural decision processes. In this guest post, Andrew describes work done with Patrick Ward, Mary Killilea, and Md. Ehsanul Haque Tamal developing "microtasks for micropayments" programs with Nafundi and ODK. Read more.
Luka Wanjohi works at the International Potato Center (CIP), where he supports their Research Information Systems. Nafundi trained CIP staff on the use of ODK, and in this guest post, Luka describes how Nafundi's training and tools have helped with CIP's monitoring and evaluation efforts. Read more.
ODK Collect now includes native support for Google Drive and Google Sheets. This powerful new feature helps organizations distribute blank forms via Google Drive and send submissions to Google Sheets without needing to use servers like ODK Aggregate. Read more.
Nafundi has added new styling options to ODK Collect that let form designers change fonts, colors, sizes, and add clickable links to ODK forms. Styling can be added using Markdown, a popular and easy-to-use markup language. Read more.
For the World Health Organization (WHO) and ministries of health working to combat and forever put an end to the debilitating poliovirus, access to accurate and time-sensitive information makes a world of difference. ODK is currently being used by WHO and governments in several countries across WHO's Eastern Mediterranean and Africa Regions, including Jordan, Somalia, and South Sudan, as a key tool in mass polio vaccination campaign quality control. Read more.
After a polio outbreak in October 2013, the nation of Cameroon launched several mass immunization campaigns against the disease. Early campaigns were of poor quality, but after a nationwide, bottom-up "micro-planning" exercise to gather better data on the size and location of the target population, the quality of the campaigns greatly improved and Cameroon's Ministry of Health wanted to build on their success. Read more.
The University of Washington's Computer Science and Engineering (UW CSE) program has received a $600K grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to continue improving ODK. Nafundi is a sub-grantee on this effort and will be responsible for providing technical assistance to Gates Foundation grantees interested in implementing mobile data collection. Read more.
Nafundi has received a $172K grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help stop polio transmission in endemic and outbreak countries and raise population immunity in at-risk countries by improving data quality. The one-year grant accelerates Nafundi's ongoing work with the Global Polio Eradication Initiative collecting real-time polio data with ODK in Africa and the Middle East. Read more.
I'm excited to announce the launch of the ODK Discussion Series! The goal of the discussion series is to explore the many and varied uses of ODK around the world, as well as to celebrate the contribution of Gaetano Borriello, the visionary behind the ODK project, who passed away earlier this year, far too young. Read more.
Agricultural organizations across East Africa are working hard to help smallholder farmers adapt to a changing climate and marketplace. Data is crucial to this adaptation, but organizations face challenges collecting reliable field data, sharing information with partners, and communicating actionable insights back to farmers. Read more.
The team at Nafundi has been designing ODK forms for almost a decade. In that time, we've learned a few form design techniques that has improved data quality for our clients. In this post, we share a few of these techniques with our fellow form designers. Read more.
At Nafundi, we are always looking to help those who have data collection problems, regardless of their budget. Yesterday, XLSForm Offline was $95 and ODK Aggregate VM was $995. Today, we're happy to announce that XLSForm Offline and ODK Aggregate VM are now free. Forever. Read more.
Every year, the University of Washington selects four outstanding individuals who have made significant contributions to the field of engineering and presents each with a Diamond Award. This year, Nafundi's CEO Yaw Anokwa was selected for the Diamond Award for Distinguished Service. The committee chose Yaw out of the tens of thousands of alumni because of his use of technology in helping the underserved. Read more.
Shantanu Singh is the founder of Vacant Voices, an organization committed to solving the problem of abandoned homes in America's neighborhoods. In this guest post, Shantanu explains how Vacant Voices uses ODK to collect and deliver crowd-sourced neighborhood data to community organizations who can make a difference. Read more.
Dennis Kinambuga is a Monitoring and Evaluation Officer with the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), where he supports the monitoring and evaluation of the World Food Programme's Purchase for Progress project in 17 countries. In this guest post, Dennis explains how Nafundi has helped AERC collect and analyze more than 3.6 million data points for the Purchase for Progress project. Read more.
We have tremendously sad news. Our friend, colleague, and advisor Gaetano Borriello has passed away. Gaetano was the visionary and leader of ODK. It was his idea that started ODK and his focus on academic research that improves the lives of the underserved that created the ODK community. Read more.
Brian Chu is an Associate Program Director with the Neglected Tropical Diseases Support Center (NTD-SC) where he provides managerial, statistical, and technical leadership to multiple operational research projects and monitoring and evaluation efforts. In this guest post, Brian explains how Nafundi has helped NTD-SC collect 50 million data points across 200 projects in 40 countries. Read more.
The goal of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) is to ensure that no child suffers from the paralysis caused by polio. Great progress has been made since GPEI's foundation in 1988. Worldwide incidence of polio has fallen by 99% and some 10 million people are walking today because of GPEI's work. The global health community is now pushing to rid the world of the remaining 1% of polio cases and mobile data collection is essential to validating that this important work is done well. Read more.
Nafundi's XLSForm Offline is an app for Windows and Mac that converts data collection forms created with the XLSForm standard into XForms that ODK Collect or ODK Aggregate need. Once converted, it also validates that the XForm will run perfectly with all ODK tools. Read more.
We are excited to announce that ODK Collect v1.4.4 includes delete after send and forced form saves, two great new features that Nafundi added to increase data safety in ODK Collect. If you haven't upgraded already, now is a great time! Read more.
ODK Briefcase 1.4.4 introduces a new Command Line Interface (CLI) that will help you automate downloading forms from ODK Aggregate (or ODK Collect) and exporting the forms to an Excel-compatible format like CSV. It can even decrypt those forms if they are encrypted. Read more.
On the eastern edge of the Democratic Republic of Congo lies Virunga National Park, home to the endangered mountain gorilla. The biggest risk to the gorillas' habitat is illegal logging for firewood, and data collection plays a crucial role in helping to protect that habitat. Read more.
Feed the Future (FTF) is the U.S. Government's global hunger and food security initiative. The USAID-funded initiative focuses on twelve countries in Africa, four in Asia, and three in Latin America and the Caribbean. An initiative of this size requires large scale monitoring and evaluation, and Nafundi plays an important role in enabling faster turnaround times and greater standardization among the country-specific surveys that FTF uses. Read more.
Five years ago, Carl and I went to Eldoret, Kenya with a few Android phones so we could pilot the app that would become ODK. Read more.
Our team at Nafundi often gets asked about the best way to get data from ODK Aggregate. Is it exporting or publishing or APIs? Well, it's complicated. Read more.
Big Data Social Science (BDSS) project at Penn State University that trains researchers in various disciplines on data science and analytics. It's an exciting new model for graduate education and the BDSS site describes the problem they are trying to solve well. Read more.
The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) wanted to empower local forest monitors with tools so they could contribute to an effort documenting the health of natural resources around the world. For this to work, JGI needed phone and tablet software that reduced data entry, increased data quality, and allowed each local community to make decisions using their own data in near real time. In a recent blog post on community forest monitoring, JGI explains their vision: Read more.
UW Viewpoint magazine profiles University of Washington students, faculty and alumni who are making a difference. Their Fall 2013 issue features a story on Nafundi's mission to replace paper forms and surveys with smartphones and tablets. Read more.
Nafundi was featured in a Nordstrom commercial for Citizens of Humanity jeans. The ad is running on Nordstrom.com and it's a fun look at the company and a great overview of the work we do. Read more.
The Humanosphere site covers the most important issues in the global health, aid and development arena. They have a fantastic podcast and this week, they sat down with Yaw, Nafundi's CEO, to discuss what we call "the paper problem" in health care. Read more.
Bloom! is Seattle's showcase evening of innovative speakers working in sustainability. There have been six Blooms in Seattle so far and we were excited to be part of Bloom 7. Read more.
The Task Force for Global Health does a lot of data collection and reporting all over the world. As part of their work, they provide their users with a dataset and a codebook that explains the data. Generating a codebook can be tedious work, so Task Force hired Nafundi to automate the process. Read more.
When we designed the ODK data collection platform, we wanted to make sure would work all over the world. For that reason, supporting multiple languages inside each tool has always been an important goal. With the community's help, we've made great progress. For example, ODK Collect has been localized into twenty languages! Read more.
Google I/O is an annual developer conference that showcases the latest from Google's product teams and partners. One of the exciting parts of I/O is the Developer Sandbox, where apps based on Google technologies and products are shown to the thousands of attendees. Read more.
We have made a commitment to improving ODK, and for this new v1.3 release of the ODK Collect app, we are excited to add more features that make data collection easier for users. These features include auto sending of finalized forms, forward/backward buttons for navigation, and bulk configuration of devices. Read more.
Our work on apps with a humanitarian touch was recently featured on NPR's All Things Considered. The story titled, More than just Angry Birds, apps can have a humanitarian side too, focuses on developers who are merging their human rights work with their interest in creating smartphone apps. Read more.
The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation is a research institute working in the area of global health statistics and evaluation. As stated on their website, their goals are "to identify the best strategies to build a healthier world. By measuring health, tracking program performance, finding ways to maximize health system impact, and developing innovative measurement systems, IHME provides a foundation for informed decision-making that ultimately will lead to better health globally." Read more.
If you collect data using the ODK platform, you know that ODK Aggregate is the server that the ODK Collect mobile app downloads new forms from and sends completed forms to. ODK Aggregate is also where you can visualize and export your data. You can install ODK Aggregate on a computer using Tomcat or in the cloud using Google App Engine, but both of these installation methods come with big challenges. Read more.
Geekwire is a fantastic tech news site that focuses on all the technology happenings in the Seattle area. A few days ago, they featured Nafundi's work blending mobile technologies and social good in their weekly podcast. Read more.
Grameen Foundation Technology Center is responsible for much of the technology programs at the Grameen Foundation. Their work focuses on use of mobile phones to improve the lives and livelihoods of the very poor and so it was no surprise that they were one of earliest adopters of ODK. Read more.
We are excited to announce three new features we just added to ODK Build, the popular form designer for ODK. The features enable users to build higher quality forms through support for metadata prompts, outputs in captions, and calculates on prompts. Read more.
Yaw, Nafundi's CEO, will be on a Doctors Without Borders panel moderated by KUOW's Ross Reynolds this Thursday, November 29, 2012 at 7:00 PM in Seattle. The "Closing the Digital Divide in Global Health" panel is free, open to the public, and fully accessible. The abstract is listed below. Read more.
One long requested addition to ODK's mobile client has been admin mode. Today, I'm excited to announce that Nafundi, with support from eHealth Nigeria, has just added admin mode to ODK Collect! Read more.
PATH describes itself as an "international nonprofit organization that transforms global health through innovation. We take an entrepreneurial approach to developing and delivering high-impact, low-cost solutions, from lifesaving vaccines, drugs, diagnostics, and devices to collaborative programs with communities." Read more.
As many of you know, ODK is an academic research project, and as such, much of the day to day work is done by students. Carl and I were two of the first students on the project and because we have finished our Ph.Ds, our roles on ODK are changing. Read more.