Tech4Dev Project Report #10 – July 2021

Building the Open-Source Technology Ecosystem for the Social Sector.

More information: Tech4Dev 2 Pager, Tech4Dev Info Deck

Summary

2021 has been a roller coaster ride that does not seem to end in some parts of the world. While the US seems to have returned to regular life, Q2 2021 impacted both urban and rural India harshly. A significant percentage of personnel from both our NGO and software partner networks were directly or indirectly impacted by COVID. This led to our slowest quarter since our inception from an outreach and deployment perspective.

We continue our focus on our open-source platforms. FundImpact (FI), our platform that helps social organizations track project funds, deliverables, and impact on the ground. Dhwani RIS has been working with NGOs like Pradan, Shelter Associates, Medha to extend FI to their needs.

Glific has continued onboarding more NGOs onto the platform. We onboarded 4 NGOs this quarter, and we hope to onboard a few more as the pandemic in India recedes. As of June, we have 24 NGOs on the platform. We work closely with our partner NGOs in extending the platform to meet their needs. The case study in this report shows how one of our partners served their community and network effectively via Glific.

Highlights and Misses

Our work with Internet Freedom Foundation and Civic Data Lab in open data helped in the Supreme Court decision that issued notice & directed the Union of India to investigate why IT Act Sec 66A cases are still being registered and file a counter-affidavit within 2 weeks.
Glific v1.8 was released in early July. A new version of the Glific Product Video along with other videos is available on our youtube channel.
Glific’s consulting practice started in Q2 2021. We are working with multiple NGOs to meet their specific requirements, like Digital Green to build an audio chatbot.
Our financials are in a good state due to reduced expenses in the past 15 months. This will enable our current funding to support us for an additional year.
Tech4Dev’s fifth cohort was held during Q2, 2021 at the height of the pandemic. Some of the NGOs selected during this cohort had to withdraw due to pandemic issues.
Our three open-source platforms: Avni, FundImpact, and Glific had a slow quarter in onboarding new NGOs. We also refrained from actively marketing to NGOs in Q2 2021, due to the impact of the pandemic on their staff and other higher priorities.
We welcome Ravi Dronamraju into our funding circle.

Glific Case Study – Reap Benefit

Reap Benefit is one of the leading NGOs that have really used the WhatsApp chatbot system to great advantage. We have been interacting and learning from them as much as we can so as to provide leverage to other NGOs from the good things they have been able to do. In the past 6 months, they have reached out to 40,000+ beneficiaries, exchanging 1m+ messages. Along with a good testament to the Glific platform, it’s a bigger testament to the program delivery problem we had set out to solve for the social sector.

“Glific has provided a really simple, customizable tool to meet most of our use cases,” said Gauthamraj, chatbot program lead at Reap Benefit. “This is a big achievement for us. We’re planning to onboard 50K more citizens” he said, sharing their near future plans. The Reap Benefit team has been able to make 2X improvements in their programs with Glific as compared to other competitive solutions used in the past. The biggest benefit to them has been the ability to customize the platform such as when they built Google Sheets integration with Glific to serve COVID-affected families. These implementations further validate features that we should make available to a larger set of NGOs, making Glific a go-to choice.

It’s been a bit more than a year since the pandemic, and our decision to devote most of our energy and resources to our open-source platforms, Glific and FundImpact. In retrospect, this was the right decision, and we’ll spend some time reflecting on what worked and what did not. So a random, semi-structured walk of our journey in the past year.

Financials

Income
Grants – Contributions
Funders		2019 (USD)	2020 (USD)	2021 (USD)	2021 (INR)
International Funders		$785,000	$838,150	$849,630	₹63,722,250
Contribution from NGOs		$0	$14,300	$0	₹0
Indian Funders		$24,286	$71,429	$0	₹0
Total Grants Received		$809,286	$923,879	$849,630	₹63,722,250
Expenditure
Support for NGOs – Expenses
Sector		2019 (USD)	2020 (USD)	2021 (USD)	2021(INR)
Rights and Advocacy		$133,841	$72,733	$0	₹0
Education and Life Skills		$177,534	$96,959	$0	₹0
Governance & Public Finance		$55,570	$51,222	$0	₹0
Health		$15,857	$74,102	$0	₹0
Technology		$25,000	$50,000	$0	₹0
Rural Development		$31,380	$0	$0	₹0
Research		$48,885	$229,007	$70,492	₹5,286,900
Support for NGOs – Total Costs		$488,067	$574,023	$70,492	₹5,286,900
Other Costs – Expenses
Area	Description	2019 (USD)	2020 (USD)	2021 (USD)	2021 (INR)
Events + Travel	Attendance at funder & partner events	$17,900	$2,000	$0	₹0
Strategy + Legal	Fees paid to Svarya directly from CGF	$18,500	$69,108	$6,600	₹495,000
Other Costs – Total Costs		$36,400	$71,108	$6,600	₹495,000
Total Expenditure		$524,467	$645,131	$77,092	₹5,781,900
Surplus for the year		$284,819	$278,748	$772,538	₹57,940,350
Surplus to date		$284,819	$563,567	$1,336,105	₹100,207,875

Details on individual projects can be accessed here.

Want More Details?

All our blog posts can be found on the project website. All project documentation can be found on our shared google drive folder. Each project blogs every month, so we have quite a bit of

detail and history as the project evolves

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