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Which Digital Development Solution is Best for Your Humanitarian Project?

By Guest Writer on October 21, 2021

ict4d solutions catalog

If you work for a global humanitarian organization, you probably know the challenges in finding accurate, complete, reliable, and up to date data on digital development solutions. Technology vendors are keen to promote their ICT4D tools, and development projects typically focus on human impacts, leaving a gap on which tools work best on a specific Sustainable Development Goal.

The Digital Impact Alliance developed the Catalog of Digital Solutions to help us all. This interactive online resource supports strategic decision making with comparable data on digital technologies for solution discovery and evaluation for:

  • Project leaders evaluating existing software platforms versus developing new solutions
  • Donor staff trying to coordinate investments across different sectors
  • Government ministers looking for tools and platforms deployed in a specific country context

The Catalog collects information from a wide range of data sources and presents it in a user-friendly way that provides insights for donors, governments, procurers, implementers, and product owners. Data is aggregated from the World Health Organization, the Digital Public Goods Alliance, Digital Square, the German Development Corporation, Gates Foundation, as well as other sources.

Use the ICT4D Solution Recommendation Wizard

The Requirements and Recommendation Wizard allows users to answer a few simple questions about their project to receive targeted information and resources to support their work at every phase of the project lifecycle.

For example, a project manager working on a digital COVID-19 response vaccination project could use the Wizard, answering a few quick questions about their project. The Wizard will then provide resources tailored to their use case – links to similar projects, information about digital products that could be used, use cases that have been developed to support COVID-19 response, as well as other guidance and resources, such as tools to measure ROI for their project.

The Wizard can be used at different times during the project lifecycle – ideation, planning, implementation, or monitoring/evaluation. The output of this tool will be tailored to provide the resources and information that are applicable to the current project phase.

Adapted from Announcing the Launch of the DIAL Catalog of Digital Solutions by Steve Conrad, Sarah Farooqi

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3 Comments to “Which Digital Development Solution is Best for Your Humanitarian Project?”

  1. Mika Välitalo says:

    Greeting Fingo from Fingo – the umbrealla organization for Finnish development NGOs – and applause for the launch of the this catalogue. While there have been many local / small scale catalogues in the past years, this is much more comprehensive and systematic than ever before. Having this available should save lots of time from countless of development actors.

    The navigation and understanding the differences between products, workflows, use cases, projects etc. takes a bit of time – maybe a introductory video would lower the threshold in general?

    Best, Mika Välitalo

    • Steve Conrad says:

      Thanks for your comment, Mika. Look for some introductory and training/tutorial videos on the Catalog coming out later this year.
      Steve Conrad

  2. Atepo-Alunga Joseph says:

    Interested