From Data Fragmentation to Global Standardization: An IRC Case Study

How the International Rescue Committee (IRC) uses CommCare to scale impact.

A mission to restore lives and livelihoods

The mission of the IRC is to help people whose lives and livelihoods are shattered by conflict and disaster, including the climate crisis, to survive, recover, and gain control over their future.

Delivering high-impact, cost-effective programs in more than 40 countries and across 20 United States cities, the IRC’s dedicated teams act to improve people’s health, safety, economic well-being, education, and power.

Moving beyond fragmented data systems

“Because our grants are often short, and because we work in multiple countries and across many types of programs, from malnutrition treatment to legal advice to cash distribution, we struggled when we used various data collection platforms that were not standardised or interoperable.”

“Too much effort was spent building new Excel tools and not enough analysing and using data. This also created risks for data security. These issues coupled with poor-quality data led to limited data use. It required us to adopt one tool which led to an exploration of many technologies.”

Joseph Ouma, IRC

CommCare: a frontline data and service delivery platform

“We chose CommCare as our frontline data collection and service delivery platform. As part of our work in 2020, the IRC provided 31 million people with access to health services, 2.6 million people with clean water, and more than 800,000 children with education.”

Joseph Ouma, IRC

High-quality, quick-to-deploy tools

From a frontline perspective, switching to CommCare Enterprise meant the IRC could provide its global workforce and country offices with high-quality, quick-to-deploy tools to support them in their data collection, and develop standard reports to help them better understand the data they were collecting. The organization is now on a path to having one common platform for collecting and managing global program data.

Streamlining global administration

From a headquarters perspective, global administration was streamlined because the IRC could manage its project spaces centrally. That allowed the team to develop standard best-practice versions of tools, provide an enhanced support model, simplify billing, provide identity access management, and offer learning and support throughout the organization. With a dedicated account manager, the IRC has an avenue to raise challenges and discuss feature improvements. It also learns from peer organizations through CommCare’s Community of Practice.

Smarter strategy through data integration

From a reporting and strategy perspective, the IRC uses CommCare’s ecosystem of integrations so that teams can analyze and visualize data with Excel and Power BI easily.

“Greater frontline impact, easier global administration, and smarter strategy at the global level.”

Joseph Ouma, IRC

A vision for lasting change

In the next 15 years, the IRC will reach a hundred years of service. The organization has a clear vision supported by a global technology strategy to make lasting change in the lives of those affected by crisis.

Dimagi thanks Joseph Ouma for contributing to this case study. To find out more about how CommCare can serve the needs of your organization, please reach out to us.