All Children Reading: Malawi

Back in 2012, Human Network International (HNI) was awarded an All Children Reading grant to combat global literacy challenges. We proposed to build the capacity of Education Sector partners in any six of USAID’s 100+ eligible countries to collect the data they need to make better decisions.

Photo Credit: USAID

USAID/Malawi was among the first to express interest in HNI’s support, and an HNI team traveled to Malawi in November 2013 to collaborate with USAID’s local Education Sector stakeholders to modernize their data collection using mobile technology. Six local and international partners were chosen to participate:

• African Centre of Communication for Development (ACCD)
• Centre for Education Research and Training (CERT)
• Creative Centre for Community Mobilization (CRECCOM)
• Forum of African Women Educationalists in Malawi (FAWEMA)
• Malawi Institute of Education (MIE)
• Save the Children

HNI worked with these partners to identify their data collection needs and then held a two-day workshop in the southern town of Zomba to train them on mobile collection with the DataWinners platform and develop their first pilot projects with mobile technology. Click below for our Malawi Photo Album with more photos of modernizing data collection in action!

Our Malawi partners’ pilot projects are currently underway, and they seek to collect data on a broad range of topics, including student enrollment and attendance, student and teacher performance, educational resources, teaching methods, and tracking the implementation and impact of projects.

While some projects involve transforming paper forms to digital questionnaires for existing projects, others target entirely new and exciting collection and communication initiatives made possible by taking advantage of the SMS, Smartphone/Tablet, and Web technology already available to the partners! HNI continues to support these organizations as they scale up these pilots, and we will keep you posted as the projects progress.

HNI would like to again thank all of the participants, as well as the excellent support from the USAID/Malawi Education Team. Happy Data Collection!

DataWinners is an online, do-it-yourself mobile data collection service designed by Human Network International (HNI) that allows organizations in the developing world to submit and receive field data in seconds using any combination of SMS, Smartphone/Tablet, and Web.