An NGO was training approximately 2,000 smallholder coffee farmers in Tanzania. They were keeping track of the farmers using an Excel sheet and were noticing they were losing sight of some information and were dealing with duplicates in their data. They also knew that they would be extending their training activities to about 25,000 farmers and were looking for a solution for the increased monitoring requirements.

Together we first opted for cleaning the data and moving them to a very basic Access database in which some control mechanisms were built-in. The staff quickly realised how easy it was to work with Access and started discovering additional advantages such as the reporting options. In interaction with Chanzo the organisation learned more about data management and their own needs. Over the years the basic database has been developed into a monitoring and evaluation database which provides reporting functionality on more than 50 performance indicators.

Benefits for the client:

Staff of the NGO are now capable of independently monitoring approximately 30,000 farmers and their participation in approximately 50,000 training events and reporting on performance indicators to different donors. Quality and consistence of the progress reports has increased.

Chanzo’s tasks included:

• Assess the needs of the NGO with regard to their data management
• Develop the database application for monitoring and evaluation
• Develop and impart on job training making extensive use of peer-to-peer training
• Provide technical assistance when needed
• Develop a data collection tool and work flow using Open Data Kit (ODK)