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Can a Data Dashboard Save a Child's Life?

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ChildFund’s Global Impact

The Ecosystem Behind ChildFund’s Global Impact

Many view technology as something cold a mere combination of servers, pipelines, and lines of code. But at UrbaDigital, we’ve learned that behind every data point on a dashboard, there is a human story waiting to be addressed.

A timely piece of data in Health, Education, or Child Protection is an intervention that can save a life, build a bridge to better opportunities, and prevent vulnerability.

This is the core of our work on the CAMEL Program Dashboard for ChildFund International, a global organization dedicated to connecting children and youth with the resources they need to grow up safe, healthy, and educated.

The Context: The Challenge of Fragmented Global Data Measuring impact worldwide presents a monumental technological challenge. ChildFund generates around 50 GB of data, continuously fed by over 2,000 active users and 154 local implementing partners across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. This massive volume of information was primarily fragmented across two distinct data collection systems:
  • DHIS2: An open-source platform used for registering household and participant information, as well as tracking daily program implementation.
  • CommCare: A premium application focused on standardizing global outcome surveys, humanitarion contexts, and measuring Key Impact Outcomes (KIOs).
The challenge for Urbadigital was clear: consolidate these isolated data sources into a single, centralized analytics platform and project it into an interactive Power BI dashboard. The goal was to stop looking at scattered databases and start seeing a coherent global story.

Our Methodology: Transforming Data Chaos into Strategic Clarity

To bridge the gap between complex raw data and actionable insights, UrbaDigital applied a comprehensive, multi-phased methodology aligned with ChildFund’s specific programmatic needs:
1. Deep Discovery and Requirement Definition Technology must serve the people using it. We began with a series of Discovery Sessions involving key stakeholders, including the VP of Programs, the global Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL) team, technical advisors, and country offices. This allowed us to align the dashboard with ChildFund’s MEL Data Model, structuring the architecture to answer six vital questions:

  •  Why? (Alignment with Global Results and SDGs)
  • What? (Program interventions)
  • To whom? (Participant demographics)
  • Where? (Geographical locations)
  • Who? (Implementing partners)
  • How? (Implementation details and mode of delivery)

2. Automated Data Pipeline Development (ETL) To ensure high-quality, near real-time information, our data engineering team designed a robust pipeline to connect the built-in APIs of both DHIS2 and CommCare. We built an automated Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) process that channels this data into a centralized AWS-based Data Warehouse (Analytics Platform). This eliminated manual data crunching and ensured minimal latency.

3. UX/UI Design and Data Modeling in Power BI Understanding that the dashboard would be used by everyone from global executives to regional directors and local managers, we prioritized a “drill-down” user experience. We mapped the data points to design an interface in Power BI where leaders can view high-level global organizational performance, and with a few clicks, investigate specific bottlenecks in a single country or village.

4. Training and Handover To guarantee the long-term sustainability of the project, our methodology included comprehensive documentation covering pipeline architecture, data models, and customization guides, alongside dedicated training sessions for key users.