Announcing the First Annual CommCare Research Grant & the 2022 Winners

We’re excited to launch the first CommCare Grant for Frontline Research to celebrate and support research teams around the world, who share our commitment to global health and development. Over the past 20 years, research has been indispensable to improving global health development outcomes, and to the work we do creating sustainable impact for underserved populations.

What is the CommCare Research Grant 

The CommCare Research Grant is an exciting new grant opportunity that provides researchers with comprehensive support through funding, tools, and technical support. 

In total we’re awarding over $210,000 across 13 winners, including $20,000 in funding to support research projects.  

The awards include:

• 1st Place Winner: $10,000 grant award, a free year of CommCare, and CommCare onboarding with our Customer Success Team
• Two 2nd-place winners: $5,000 grant award, and a free year of CommCare 
• 10 runners-ups: 1-year free subscriptions to CommCare

Each recipient will also receive expert support from Dimagi and opportunities to collaborate with us to promote their work.

The Process

The grant was officially announced during our webinar on global health research, From Studies to Practice: Building Digital Solutions to Advanced Frontline Research on June 23. Following which, applications were open for just over a month. In that time, we received 380 applications from universities, NGOs, and research institutes from around the world on a range of fascinating and exciting projects, and studies. 

52% of submissions were for health-focused projects, and 77% were for projects in Africa –– with Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya each submitting the most applications.

We then formed a committee of experienced jurors from across Dimagi to review the applications. In order to qualify for jury-review, all of the following criteria had to be true about a submission:

• It is a research project
• CommCare fits and supports the project’s needs
• The application is complete
• The project addresses an SDG(s)
• The project is not already using CommCare

Applications that checked every box were then scored by our jury based on the strength of their technical approach (including clarity of aims, plan, timeline, and measurable outcomes) and potential impact. 

And now, for the winners!

After thorough review and close consideration, we’re thrilled to announce this year’s inspiring winners below.

This year’s 1st place winner is Move Up Global & Harvard Medical! Congratulations Anatole Manzi! 

The two 2nd Place Winners are:

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

And the 10 runners up are:

• Action for Development and Health (Nigeria) – Emmauel 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
• icddrb (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

The biggest congratulations to each of you from all of us at Dimagi. We look forward to working with each of you and are excited to help power your projects with the best available tool to efficiently collect, manage, and leverage your data.

We also would like to acknowledge all those who submitted, it was truly inspiring to see the great ideas and work being done in this space. 

Stay tuned for our next blog post for a deeper-dive and updates on the awardees’ work and  their experience with CommCare as their projects progress.