Why There Has Never Been a Better Time For Impact-Driven Organisations to Embrace Technology

Impact-driven organisations are also data-driven organisations. Without data, nongovernmental and social enterprises are blind to the needs of the communities they seek to serve and are also blind to the impact their programs are having.

Over the past decade, technological change has meant that data has become more plentiful, accessible, and actionable for organisations nimble enough to collect it. From the growth of smartphones, smartphone literacy and infrastructure, AI-driven analytics, blockchain technology, and the emergence of decentralisation in how people interact and transact… there has never been a better time for impact-driven organisations to increase their reliance on technology.

Consider the following:

Mobile phone penetration in the developing world, while lagging the developed world, is growing rapidly, as is the infrastructure that supports the networks they use. According to the World Bank, “more households in developing countries own a mobile phone than have access to electricity or clean water, and nearly 70 percent of the bottom fifth of the population in developing countries own a mobile phone.”

Of those, Pew Research finds that emerging economy smartphone penetration rates range from around 1 in 4 people in India to roughly 60 percent in Brazil and South Africa.

Peer-to-peer money transfers are growing as people seek cheaper ways to spend, lend, borrow, and send money as access to micro- and neo-banking services soars.

As smartphone and internet penetration rises in developing countries, so does digital literacy. While there remain persistent divides between urban and rural, male and female, and young and older population groups, internet usage is trending upward.

Just as digital data entry tools largely replaced their pen-and-paper predecessors, new technologies that use smartphones and internet connections are replacing many face-to-face interactions.

That dynamic was propelled by the COVID pandemic, during which society worldwide was largely forced to take offline activities online to comply with social distancing regulations.

The online landscape cannot replace everything in the physical world. But it is a worthwhile substitute for a lot of our interactions.

The development sector acknowledges that data deficits are problematic when implementing and measuring the success of programs. According to a study by KPMG in 2014, up to 81 percent of NGOs underspend on M&E.

That is despite the recognition that data is crucial for decision-making.

The United Nations Joint Inspection Unit, 2017:

“Robust and adequate oversight functions and reports have the potential to enhance donor confidence.”

The ILO, 2011:

“… the real challenge is for interventions to produce lasting, long term results. The ultimate measure of the success of an intervention is for the desired changes in the lives of [beneficiaries] to still be present, in some manner, after the project itself has phased out.”

Bill Gates, Gates Foundation, 2019:

“By embracing data, research, and the collective knowledge of their local community, schools have an opportunity to help students succeed…”

Havuta has developed a technological solution to many of the challenges of data collection in the developing sector, focused on both retained long-term connectivity between organisations and their beneficiaries to enable longitudinal data collection, and real-time, on-the-go data collection for organisations seeking to learn and adapt programs as they progress.

The data imperative has never been stronger.

And data collection capabilities have never been as accessible.

The development sector has the resources and the recognized need and desire to make data-driven decisions. With Havuta, it now has the tools.

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