Review of 2023

In this blog, we review everything that happened in Avni in 2023, and give a glimpse of how we think Avni is going to shape up in 2024.

Impact

In 2023 8 new projects from a diverse set of domains decided to use Avni, multiple of them state-wide rollouts.

• Aga Khan Rural Support Program worked with Avni to help with strengthening operation and maintenance of water supply schemes in Bihar. Avni is being used by Anurakshaks - people who are entrusted to maintain piped water supply in wards.
• Bahmni Outreach - ThoughtWorks integrated Avni into Bahmni, an open-source hospital information system, in order to integrate the flow of information between primary care hospitals and outposts. This is currently being piloted in a few Health and Wellness centres in Karnataka. As part of this project they have integrated with ABHA and esanjeevani
• Mobile Creches runs creches with children in construction sites and slum settlements. Their programs help improve health, nutrition and early learning of children. Avni is used to maintain attendance, monitor health indicators and track interventions such as special diets.
• Teach Nagaland - Leadership for Equity in partnership with Nagaland government rolled out the customised version of Teach Tool earlier used in Andhra Pradesh. In this project, government school teachers are observed regularly with the aim of improving overall teaching effectiveness in schools. A pilot was performed in late 2023 in the state. The state department will now take up implementation across all government schools in Nagaland. A bit more context here
• Bhansali Trust conducts eye-camps across multiple states. They have rolled out Avni to manage records of these eye-camps.
• Population-based Hemoglobinopathy - IPH India started using Avni for the second project which involved screening and tracking care with disease and trait of Haemoglobinopathies including the most common one, that is Sickle Cell Disease.
• Sukhibhava Foundation to monitor school sessions on menstrual health and hygiene.
• GDGSGOM - ATE Chandra Foundation in partnership with Government of Maharashtra rolled out Avni app for the monitoring of desilting and rejuvenating waterbodies work done state-wide.

Most existing NGOs continued using Avni, increasing their use of Avni.

A quick view of the impact numbers from Avni cloud

• New beneficiaries added: 580,000
• Total number of beneficiaries: 3.2 million
• New users added: 11,000
• Total users till date: 21,000
• Total projects actively using Avni: ~30

Capability

Every year, there are multiple things that get added into the capability of Avni. Some of these might be visible, and some invisible. While some changes are readily apparent, others operate quietly behind the scenes, fortifying Avni for the demands of today and tomorrow. Let's delve into the notable transformations that shaped Avni's landscape in 2023.

Three thematic areas show up significantly in the capabilities added in 2023 - security, scale and stability.

Security

A pivotal moment in 2023 was the completion of a security audit for Avni. This was required for two reasons. First, to be able to implement Avni in government data centers, and the second to have a third party audit the software. At the time of this writing, two independent security audits have taken place for different projects.

Significant enhancements were implemented to fulfill the requirements of the security audit. These include updates to underlying libraries, implementation of access control, and the provision for organizations to encrypt their local databases within the Android app, bolstering Avni's defenses against potential threats.

Scale

Avni's journey towards scalability witnessed several milestones in 2023, empowering it to handle increased loads and user bases with ease. Key features introduced to facilitate scaling include:

• Dedicated Hosting - To accommodate projects with extensive user bases, dedicated infrastructure became a cornerstone of Avni's scaling strategy. By leveraging dedicated hosting, select implementations achieved enhanced resource allocation and heightened application stability. Presently, three implementations either operate on dedicated hosting or are in transition, poised to accommodate large-scale operations effectively. It's important to note that dedicated scaling is economically viable when field users exceed 1000; smaller user bases may find it financially impractical.
• Whitelabeling - There is now the capability to whitelabel new apps on the Playstore. While implementations that run on dedicated hosting need a whitelabeled app, others can opt to have one as well. With apps like Avni, Teach AP, Teach NL, and Sakhi 2.0 already available on the Play Store, a new app tailored for the Rejuvenating Water Bodies project is set to debut, promising further expansion in the coming year.

Stability

The primary focus of this year was stability. Over the course of the past 5 years, several new features were added to Avni. The diverse feature set, different use cases, some mandatory upgrades and the accumulation of data over several years created stability issues in the application. This included library upgrades in android application and moving projects out of legacy designs. primary issues that we were trying to tackle this year were An increase in the need to monitor several details of the application, significant time has been spent on automation activities. Tests, apk generation and deployment have been the primary areas of deployment in the past year.

The Avni team spent approximately one third of its time stabilizing the application. We understand many of these changes have led to disruption on the field and slow-down of development of new features and hope that the changes in 2023 will allow us to move faster this year.

Other new Features

Major new features added other than the thematic changes above include

• Integration with Glific
• Bulk assignment of subjects to a user
• Filters on custom dashboards
• Media Viewer
• Moving to app bundles (to reduce the size of app udpates)
• Draft encounters (to help when filling in long forms)
• Improvements to the external API including the ability to handle media
• Immutable encounters (to handle forms that are only ever updated)

Ecosystem

Avni Conference

Recognizing the challenges posed by the growing number of implementations and the limitations of a small team, the inaugural Avni Conference was launched in 2023 as a proactive measure to bridge communication gaps. The conference aimed to achieve several key objectives:

• Enhanced Understanding: NGOs utilizing Avni gained insights into the team's size, capabilities, and organizational structure, fostering a deeper understanding of the collaborative ecosystem.
• Issue Identification and Resolution: The Avni team leveraged the conference as an opportunity to identify and address specific challenges faced by NGOs, identifying commonalities and strategizing solutions collaboratively.
• Roadmap Alignment: Participants were provided with a comprehensive overview of the product roadmap for the year, ensuring alignment and clarity regarding future developments and initiatives.

The 2023 conference garnered positive feedback, affirming its efficacy in fostering collaboration and alignment among stakeholders. Building upon its success, the decision was made to continue hosting the conference annually, providing a dedicated platform for in-person engagement, roadmap planning, and collective decision-making.

As we convene for this year's conference, we look forward to further strengthening our partnerships, defining shared objectives, and charting a collective course towards continued innovation and impact within the Avni community.

Community led initiatives

Mid of last year as we saw increased interest from community for both implementations and contribution to platform, we oriented our processes and opened channels for support. Some community led initiatives are described below

• Swadhar is a self-service implementation where the core Avni team provides only consultancy support while the implementation is designed and implemented by themselves. This provides the team to have more implementations than what our own team can handle by ourselves.
• Bahmni Outreach and Karnataka pilot work was done by ThoughtWorks.
• Avni now integrates with Airbyte, which now provides the ability to integrate with multiple other kinds of software. It was initially developed to integrate with Dalgo - a data management platform. Two organisations are currently trying to use Avni and Dalgo to have a unified platform to manage their data visualisation needs. The integration was developed by Aviraj Gour, a 3rd year student Mathematics and computing at NIT, Hamirpur.
• A lot of improvement to the ETL platform was also done through Code4GovTech program by Akanksha Sinha who at the time was doing her BTech in Data Science and Engineering at IIT Mandi. We intend to open the project for the C4GT program in 2024 as well.

Financials

• SaaS Revenue : ₹25 lakhs
• Revenue from projects : ₹1 crore
• Grants raised : ₹1.75 crore
• Expenses : ₹3 crores
• Sustainability : ~40%

Looking towards 2024

Many of the initiatives that we want to focus in 2024 are based on feedback received from multiple sources - NGOs, support and implementation staff, product engineering and funders. Some specific changes include

• Dedicated hosting & support including L1 support for the bigger organisations to reduce the churn of releases and better response times
• Continue working on the stability, maintainability and scalability of platform and implementations
• Focus on data security within the infrastructure
• Automation with an intent to reduce on-boarding costs and streamline support
• Improve UI/UX of the mobile app
• Improve utilisation of features that are present to its fullest
• Regular bug fixes, system upgrades and minor features will keep getting added during the year
• Increase impact
• Improve sustainability

Thank you for being part of our journey, and we look forward to another year of innovation and growth together.