With over 500 projects in 50+ countries, Dimagi has witnessed success. We’ve worked with awe-inspiring organizations to design, develop and deploy mobile apps that improve lives in the Majority World. We’ve also witnessed humbling failure. Phones break and aren’t replaced, trainings can’t keep pace with attrition, tech becomes outdated as program requirements evolve, data collection is duplicated and an undercompensated workforce becomes overburdened. You know the stories.
The allure of technology is strong, and its potential is powerful. However, it’ potential to fail, if not well planned and executed, is also very real. This presentation will focus on some of Dimagi’s hardest-learned lessons about common pitfalls in deploying mobile applications for data collection and service delivery. The session will draw on our vast experience implementing mobile tools in low resource settings, from small, 10-user projects, to a national scale project with over 100,000 users, and will showcase several different case studies and examples.
This lightning talk is designed for folks or organizations looking to adopt technology, like CommCare, for MERL. Tech isn’t always the best idea, and it’s certainly not a silver bullet to fix programmatic issues. My hope is that participants will leave the session with questions and criteria to help them evaluate their systems for tech readiness so that they are in a better position to time tech interventions, anticipate risks and avoid facing costly consequences.
Erin's slides
