Scaling Information Management in Ukraine

Hi @pahoy ,

Happy to contribute to the topic! I saw many impressive systems built upon Kobo over the last few years, happy to share one of them :slight_smile: .

Context

Where was this project implemented?

In Ukraine for the Danish Refugee Council (DRC). Started progressively in 2023, still running today. It includes the typical humanitarian programs (Protection, Basic Needs, Shelter, Legal, etc.).

Who benefited from this tool or solution?

Mainly us at DRC but indirectly all entities around (beneficiaries, donors, clusters).

What problem or operational need were you trying to address?

DRC Ukraine was a massive mission. We quickly started to face scaling challenges in our IM workflows.

We had more than 200 Kobo forms where the shape diverged over the years. It became nearly impossible for us to get a global picture of what was going on.

We also had hundreds of staff members, with regular turnover. Maintaining access and, especially, sharing subsets of a database according to jobs and locations was challenging.

Reporting to the cluster through ActivityInfo required combining data from across the mission and could take days of manual work for each team.

Description

What is the solution you built?

We built an app that was pulling all the data collected through Kobo into our own SQL DB.

Then many functions were implemented:

  • What we call Meta Database, where our 200+ forms were merged into a single database with core information (Location, Program, Beneficiaries details, Donor, etc.).
  • This Meta Database was used to generate donors and cluster reports in one click, based on realtime data.
  • We built dashboards like this one https://infoportal-ua.drc.ngo/dashboard/protection-monitoring
  • Access to the app was managed by the organization account, that was maintained by HQ, so we had the location and job of our staff always up to date.

How did you use KoboToolbox to solve this problem?

To pull the data we used the API which is really well designed and powerful. Notably, we were benefiting a lot from the webhook to insert new Kobo submissions to our database.

XLSForm is really flexible, it made easy to build our complex surveys with logic and automatic calculations. The challenge is that it’s hard to keep the forms consistent. So we managed that harmonization part in our app and let our team build the forms they wanted in Kobo.

The offline mode of Kobo Enketo was really useful when collecting data in the hard-to-reach area.

What makes this approach useful or innovative?

The flexibility. We could transform and manipulate the data easily. So it was always clean, up-to-date and easy to visualize.

Links

Example of a public Protection Monitoring dashboard:

The open version of our app

Visuals

The Meta Dashboard quoted above

History of changes, really useful for cleaning up our human mistakes :smiling_face:

Databases, where we had specific features to manage accesses, visualize data and deal with begin_repeat question for instance.

5.Community Feedback

Curious to know how the community has dealt with Kobo at scale, when there are hundred of forms. We initially tried to build a system using PowerAutomate and Excel but we sadly failed :see_no_evil_monkey: .

Hope it may help.

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@alexandreannic
Thanks for sharing! This really looks like a very interesting approach.
It would be great if you could share some code snippets with the community or even better, if you have them on a GitHub repo so everyone can benefit from them.

Sure!

The repo can be found here: GitHub - DRC-UA/infoportal: Application developed for the Ukrainian humanitarian mission of DRC. It serves as a central hub for Information Management, ensuring that all mission data is harmonized and properly managed with controlled access. Β· GitHub

The Kobo SDK to interact with your API can be found here:

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