2020 Update

Product Capabilities

We constantly listen to community program teams and improve the product based on their experience of using Avni. In 2020, we added many new features and components to the product.

1. A Web-based Application to support entry by data entry operators and viewing of records, data quality check and quick corrections by program managers.
2. App & Form designer for all implementers and IT persons at community-based organisations to enable ease of configuration and self-serviceability.
3. New tools and techniques to enable sophisticated Indicator-based reports with drill-down capabilities.
4. Subject groups and households with an easy workflow for Household surveys
5. Improved Access Control: User Groups and privileges

And, many more small improvements! Avni is now simpler, powerful and much more capable.

Usage and Impact

We keep thinking about how much value Avni provides its users. As we look back this year, there are quite a few reasons to be optimistic.

All of the existing projects have continued to use Avni, some even scaled up. 6 projects went live on the field and 3 are ready to go live. 5 new projects chose to use Avni, taking the total to 25 projects. In spite of the pandemic forcing a halt of work for a few months on the field, we saw greater usage of Avni this year as compared to the previous year. 70k new beneficiaries were registered and 1.7 lakh new service instances were recorded.

Avni got used for newer domains and modules like Sanitation, Affordable Housing, Tuberculosis, Non-communicable diseases and COVID surveys.

In 2020, we also saw organisations move from using Avni for single programmes such as maternity to deeper integration of the field-work processes. This means moving all their community-based interventions to Avni. The promise of Avni to fulfil the role of the complete field-work app and a full-fledged beneficiary MIS for community-based organisations is becoming a reality.

Until 2019, Avni development was primarily funded by funding organisations. This year, several existing user organisations also came forward to contribute to the development of new features proposed by us. This demonstrated their confidence in the utility of Avni.

User Stories

We have some amazing Avni user stories to share

1. Our Journey of Remoulding Data Collection - From Paper to KoboToolbox to Avni
2. How Avni has become a pillar of the community health program at ASHWINI
3. 6 Ways Avni is helping JSS Maternal, New-born, and Child health programs

We hope to see many more in the coming times!

Check out these users stories, case studies and project updates on our blogs here and Tech4Dev blogs here.

Avni on cloud and Self-Serviceability

Before 2020 all of the implementations of Avni were done by the Avni core team at Samanvay. Mid of 2020 we made Avni available as a self-serviceable platform on the cloud with a very economical price and an easy sign-up process. We have received 24 sign-ups since then.

We also had 3 successful pilot projects where implementations were done by someone outside of the core Avni team at Samanvay, either an IT person at NGO or another tech partner. We received a lot of feedback and have come a long way on this path. Small changes in some existing projects are now done by users themselves, making them "atmanirbhar" :-)

Looking forward to 2021

Based on project demands we already have a lot of new useful features planned. These include indicators based dashboard in the android app, Approval workflow, commenting ability, News broadcast, Notifications, Phone number based individual verification. These features will help improve the quality of data from the field, facilitate more engagement between back office and field workers and provide more empowerment to the field workers.

As the number of users and beneficiaries in the system is increasing we will continue to work on the stability and usability of the system. We also plan to further improve on the self-serviceability path making rules and reports easier to do.

We are super excited!

We’d like to use this opportunity to thank all those who have been part of this journey - our users, partners, funders and well-wishers. Together we will continue to cross new milestones.

Do connect with us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

And last but not the least, wishing you a better, safer, healthy and prosperous new year 2021!