Dimagi's 2013 Year In Review

Like many of our partner organizations, Dimagi had a busy 2013. During our annual meeting last week, all 69 of our staff members had a chance to reflect on our accomplishments this past year and share what we’re most excited about for 2014.

Perhaps more than anything, 2013 was a year of rapid growth. Thanks to support from USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures, our India team launched 41 new frontline programs in India with CommCare through our Proof of Concept (POC) model. Based on this success, we expanded our POC model by creating an RFA for CommTrack POCs in India and Nepal and CommCare POCs in West Africa. We also significantly expanded our presence in West Africa thanks to several multi-year projects and opened our West Africa office in Dakar, Senegal. In November we held the first Dimagi Africa Summit in Cape Town, which was a great opportunity for our Africa team to spend some time together. Our staff ran several CommCare workshops in Guatemala, India, Kenya, Thailand, South Africa, and the US, taught our first CommCare class at Boston University, and were featured in USAID’s online mHealth course.

Our technology also crossed a few exciting milestones. 10,000 active users are now using CommCare and CommTrack in 200 active projects. In total, our technology has been used in 42 countries. Our tech has also got a lot better and faster, thanks to a big push from our software developers to improve CommCare’s usability and build out CommTrack and CommConnect. We’re also entered several new sectors, including agriculture, energy, women’s empowerment, conditional cash transfers, orphans and vulnerable children, nutrition, and water, sanitation, and hygiene, to name a few. One great metric is the number of CommCare self-starters projects more than doubled in 2013, from 15 to 37. These self-starter projects are all over the world, and include projects that are helping track violence in Cape Town, screen for cardiovascular disease, and track chronic disease in Mexico. To me, this jump in self-starters is a true testament to CommCare’s improved usability as a platform.

Finally, Dimagi continued to establish itself as a leader in ICT4D. In February, we released our CommCare Evidence Base, demonstrating that CommCare is the most evidence-based mobile platform for Frontline Workers. CommCare and CommTrack were also part of several large development awards, including two Saving Lives at Birth awards, two catalytic grants for mHealth innovation, and two African Development Bank awards. We also won awards for projects in gender-based violence , fistula care, and improving the partograph. Our work was also recognized in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Foreign Policy, and made the Inc 5000 list for the second year in a row. Finally, our CEO Jonathan Jackson was featured in Business Insider, selected as a finalist for Entrepreneur of the Year, and spoke at the APHA and World Economic Forum. 

2013 was a great year at Dimagi, and there is a lot that we are looking forward to in 2014. In particular, 2014 will be one focused around scaling. We are preparing to expand our work in Bihar to thousands of users, and are launching a 2,400 CHW project in Haiti with Pathfinder. In Burkina Faso, we will be working to bring an IMCI project to national scale, and are working to scale CommTrack nationally in numerous countries in Africa as well

In order to maintain this scale, we will be focusing on developing new tools to support programs as they grow. We will be making a big push to develop a CommCare Certification Program, which will quality non-Dimagi staff as having certain capabilities to support Dimagi technology, and the CommCare Maturity model that qualifies overall programs. We will also develop and implement our Engagement Model to apply standardized services to improve capabilities of a program at different maturity levels.

Finally, we hope to continue our impact work in 2014. Now that we have significant evidence showing that CommCare improves access to and the quality, experience, and accountability of services, we will begin prioritizing our research to test how CommCare impacts clients’ knowledge, attitude, and practice. We will also begin to prioritize analyzing CommCare usage data, both as a way to help assess impact-improving efforts and to improve web users’ experience using analytics and reports.

If you have any ideas for things you would like to see Dimagi accomplish in 2014, feel free to email me at gjavetski@dimagi.com. Thanks for reading, and happy 2014 from Dimagi!