
ODK Stoplight – visual surveys for microfinance to help bring individuals out of poverty.
About
Fundación Paraguaya developed a series of poverty indicators that can be assessed as green-, yellow-, or red-status (with accompanying visual representations of each status for each indicator). This ‘visual survey’ can be given before, during, or at several points following a loan or other program in order to better understand the way it affected the individual’s quality of life. FP wanted a robust data platform that would allow their field staff to administer the survey better and their partners to scale the methodology around the world.
Challenge
The first goal of the project was to create a baseline platform collecting visual survey results by means of developing a solution built on top of ODK 2.0.
This platform would enable the creation of visual surveys. Surveyors would present them to beneficiaries in the field by using mobile devices, such as tablets. This data would then be sent to a server responsible for collecting them, as well as aggregating or reporting on them. Many of the beneficiaries targeted would be of limited literacy, which had to be reflected in the application, by providing a feature of creating forms that would contain appropriate types of questions.
The second goal was to test and assess the state of ODK 2.0 by determining the platform’s readiness to meet the requirements, as well as getting a sense of its state – the number of bugs and overall stability.
Solution
- ODK Aggregate Server – changes related to data hierarchy and the Docker image were pushed to this fork;
- ODK Survey App –the mobile version for collecting data, and ODK Collect equivalent in version two. We made multiple extensions for it in order to make it meet the requirements;
- ODK Services (previously known as the core) –the basis used by other ODK Tools for services such as database connections, content provisioning, etc. Changes were made to allow syncing only selected forms, as well as downloading and uploading them separately.
Result

References
“SolDevelo put together an incredible team for this project. Their expertise in ODK and their strong programming skills were essential to the project’s success. They were great partners throughout, who understood both the technology and the social mission. We were pleased with not only the resulting code, but with the knowledge we gained about ODK 2.0.”

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