For twenty years digital development NGOs gave governments our software for free, because USAID and the foundations paid us to. USAID is gone, the foundations now fund around us, and the governments kept the software.
We called this sustainability. Open source plus government ownership was the exit plan in every proposal I wrote, and DHIS2 still describes itself as a leading example of a Digital Public Good. The plan worked. Governments adopted the systems. Nobody wrote down who pays the builders afterward.
Let’s be honest about what we built: a product with no price and a customer we never invoiced.
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Kenya Paid Everyone Except the NGOs
Living Goods and Medic launched the Smart Health app in Busia County in 2016. In 2020 Kenya’s Ministry of Health chose a tool based on that app as its national eCHIS.
Then Kenya spent real money.
Daily Nation reports the government procured about 110,000 smartphones, and Dr Patrick Amoth, the ministry’s Director General for Health, put the implementation budget at Sh5.2 billion. In June 2026 President Ruto announced Sh13.7 billion for 107,000 community health promoters, tools included.
I found no public record of a shilling paid to the two NGOs for the software.
The same ministry did pay for software once. In 2024 it awarded a KSh 104.8 billion, ten-year contract to Safaricom, Apeiro, and Konvergenz. Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu found the consortium keeps the intellectual property.
Kenya committed Sh104.8 billion to a telco consortium for software the state does not own. It took the NGO design for free.
Old Payers Left and the New Money Goes Around Us
Think Global Health counts 34 bilateral health MOUs worth at least $24.2 billion, about 40% of it owed by recipient governments. Under those agreements the United States transfers funding responsibility from NGOs and implementing partners to governments.
I wrote in August that a tsunami of philanthropic money is coming. I stand by it. Look where the first waves landed.
Coefficient Giving’s $165 million Health Aid Transition Fund pays for technical help to governments, and Amanda Glassman, who runs it, says plainly that private philanthropy cannot fill the gap the cuts left. The Gates Foundation’s $1 billion pledge goes to AI tools.
I see no line in either for maintaining a system a ministry already runs.
The University of Oslo’s HISP Centre, which builds DHIS2, says the same about its own funders: donors moved their money to country-level systems and left a hole under the core platform. On May 20 it launched a voluntary Shared Services Fee and asked countries to write it into national budgets. When the platform in 76 countries passes the hat, every smaller NGO product should read that as its own forecast.
What Governments Do Pay NGOs For: People
I went looking for an African treasury that pays an NGO for software. I found governments paying for labor.
- HISP says its 24 local groups frequently hold standing technical assistance contracts with government agencies. It gives no figures.
- Living Goods reports Kenyan counties covered about 50% of program costs in 2023.
- Jacaranda Health reports counties pay 65% of its MENTORS nurse training. For PROMPTS, its digital product, it gives no number.
- In Malawi, VillageReach’s health hotline moved into the Ministry of Health in 2020 and the hotline workers became government employees. The system survived. The NGO’s revenue from it ended.
Ministries pay for trainers and for their own payroll. I found none paying a license fee to a nonprofit.
One Vendor Published Its Price. Read the Fine Print.
Dimagi now offers ministries a national CommCare eCHIS for $60,000 a year, covering 15,000 registered health workers. That is $4 a worker a year. Dimagi says CommCare is the selected national eCHIS in eight African countries, among them Ethiopia, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Benin, Madagascar, Mozambique, Niger, and South Africa.
I could not confirm that any of those governments pays the $60,000 from its own treasury. Ethiopia’s eCHIS ran under the USAID Digital Health Activity with JSI as prime, and the Global Fund co-sponsored Dimagi’s 2024 summit for government customers.
The price is only half the news.
Dimagi’s own comparison table puts the previous eCHIS model at $1 million or more a year, with large professional services contracts, often run through third-party implementers. The new terms require direct government procurement and no professional services.
Read that table again if you are an implementer.
Dimagi kept the code open source, put a price on the hosted service, and wrote the INGO out of the deal in its own marketing. The $940,000 difference between the two columns was INGO revenue.
The New Rules of Software Development
In January I predicted that at least 15 major INGOs would merge or close. Why? The contestants have changed.
Our rival for a ministry contract is Safaricom, which can finance delivery up front and wait years to be paid, or Dimagi, which sells at $4 a worker with no services attached.
Our new judge is a budget officer in a finance ministry who owes Washington 40 cents of every MOU dollar and faces penalties as steep as a dollar for each dollar missed. That officer has never read a theory of change. She reads a price per facility per year, in local currency.
The software was always free. The people who keep it running never were, and now they have a price tag too.
