The First CommCare Research Grant: 2022 Winners and Awardees

In 2022 we launched the first CommCare Grant for Frontline Research to support research teams advancing global health and development. This post brings the story together in one place: what the grant is, how we chose the 2022 winners, who they are, and the three top awardees we’ll be following.

What the grant is

The CommCare Grant for Frontline Research provides researchers with funding, tools, and technical support. The 2022 round awarded over $210,000 across 13 winners, including $20,000 in direct funding.

• 1st Place: $10,000, a free year of CommCare, and onboarding with our Customer Success Team
• Two 2nd-place winners: $5,000 and a free year of CommCare
• 10 runners-up: a one-year free CommCare subscription

Every recipient also gets expert support from Dimagi and opportunities to share their work with our community.

How we chose them

The grant was announced during our June 2022 webinar, From Studies to Practice: Building Digital Solutions to Advance Frontline Research. Applications were open for just over a month, and we received 380 from universities, NGOs, and research institutes around the world.

A jury of Dimagi reviewers scored qualifying applications on the strength of their technical approach (clarity of aims, plan, timeline, measurable outcomes) and potential impact. To qualify, a submission had to be a research project that fit CommCare, addressed an SDG, was complete, and was not already using CommCare.

The 2022 winners

Our 1st place winner is Move Up Global & Harvard Medical, led by Anatole Manzi.

Our two 2nd-place winners are:

• Mata Jai Kaur Maternal & Child Health Centre (India), Aneel Brar
• TackleAfrica (Côte d’Ivoire), Samantha Royle

And our 10 runners-up are:

• Action for Development and Health (Nigeria), Emmanuel Oni
• Aquaya Institute (Ghana), Joyce Kisiangani
• Boston University (Zambia), Lauren Etter
• BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health (Bangladesh), Sameen Nasar
• Federal University Oye-Ekiti (Nigeria), Dr Hammed Mogaji
• icddr,b (Bangladesh), Abul Kasham Md. Shoab
• Ifakara Health Institute (Tanzania), Emmanuel Mbuba
• J-PAL (Chile), Aníbal Guerrero
• Saving Mothers (Kenya), Augustine Kakuko
• University of Leeds (Malawi), Matthew Allsop

Congratulations to each of you, and thank you to everyone who submitted. It was inspiring to see the work being done in this space.

Meet the top three awardees

The top three awardees span the range of projects we see at Dimagi, from seasoned CommCare users to organizations moving from paper to digital for the first time.

• Move Up Global: a nonprofit established in 2019, improving health outcomes in low-resource communities through schools by bridging education and public health.
• TackleAfrica: established in 2002, using football to deliver HIV and sexual & reproductive health information and services to young people across the continent.
• Mata Jai Kaur Maternal & Child Health Centre: founded in 2018 in Rajasthan, providing high-quality reproductive and child health services in safe, women-centered environments.

What’s next

We’ll be checking in with the awardees throughout the year and sharing what we learn about frontline research, digital data collection, and the realities of running an NGO. Our next post takes a deeper look at Move Up Global and its founder, Anatole Manzi, who is also Deputy Chief Medical Officer at Partners in Health, a Lecturer at Harvard Medical School, and an Assistant Professor at the University of Global Health Equity.