How Save the Children Built a Custom CVA App on CommCare

Global humanitarian leader Save the Children runs cash and voucher assistance (CVA) programs that put choice and dignity in the hands of the families they serve. To manage those programs end to end, the organization developed a custom app on CommCare that streamlined CVA program management, from beneficiary registration to real-time financial tracking, enabling faster fund distribution and improved decision-making.

Why Save the Children built on CommCare

Delivering cash at scale demands rigorous, auditable workflows, from selecting the right beneficiaries to tracking every payment. Save the Children’s programs had been managing that work with a patchwork of outdated tools, and other solutions proved too costly, too slow to deploy, and not flexible enough to support the whole project lifecycle.

“Save the Children created our Cash and Voucher Assistance app in CommCare because our programs were struggling with a growing mountain of cash beneficiary data using a patchwork of outdated tools. Other solutions were too costly, time-consuming to deploy, and not flexible enough to meet our team’s needs across the whole project lifecycle, especially for M&E.”

Simon Fuchs, Lead Economic Adviser, Save the Children

One platform for the full CVA lifecycle

Rather than stitching together spreadsheets and separate tools, Save the Children configured a single CommCare app to carry a program from beneficiary registration through real-time financial tracking:

• Registration and selection. Field teams register households and capture the eligibility data needed to select the right beneficiaries, online or offline.
• Payment planning. Approved beneficiaries flow into payment plans, so teams know who is owed what, and when.
• Distribution. Disbursements are recorded against each beneficiary, keeping field records and finance in sync.
• Real-time financial tracking. Program and finance staff gain real-time visibility into fund distribution, follow-up, and accountability, instead of waiting on end-of-cycle reports.

“Our teams on the ground have shared positive feedback about using the CashApp in CommCare. The automated eligibility feature, based on scoring criteria, is helping them effectively identify and support the most vulnerable children and families in real time.”

Save the Children

Faster distribution, better decisions

Because registration, payments, and tracking live in one configurable system, Save the Children’s teams spend less time reconciling records by hand and more time delivering, while preserving the accountability that cash programming requires. Keeping the data connected end to end means faster fund distribution and clearer, more timely decisions, and CommCare’s support for real-time monitoring through Power BI dashboards and customizable reports lets teams track distribution progress and report on it with ease.

“Integration with other systems like Power BI has enabled our teams to achieve near unprecedented levels of real-time reporting and analytics, significantly improving our ability to monitor progress and make timely, data-driven decisions across programs.”

Save the Children

CommCare is well suited to this kind of work: it is offline-first for remote settings, configurable without code so programs can adapt the app to their own CVA model, and built with the role-based permissions and audit trails that integrity-critical cash workflows demand.