From Embracing Complexity to Solving the Right Problems

This transcript was generated by AI and may contain typos and inaccuracies.

Amie Vaccaro: Welcome to High Impact Growth, a podcast from Dimagi for people committed to creating a world where everyone has access to the services they need to thrive. We bring you candid conversations with leaders across global health and development about raising the bar on what’s possible with technology and human creativity.

I’m Amy Vaccaro, VP of CommCare Growth and Strategy at Dimagi, and your co-host, along with Jonathan Jackson, Dimagi’s CEO and co-founder. Today, it’s just the two of us. Here’s a question: Could you deploy $100 million in global health tomorrow and know where every single dollar went? Jon thinks the answer is finally yes, and in this mid 2026 check-in, he explains why.

We dig into why Dimagi retired a company value we’d held for years, walk step-by-step through a single verified home visit delivered on our Connect platform, and explore why rewarding high performance might be the biggest shift global development needs to make. Plus, John turns the tables to interview me mid-conversation.

If you’re wondering where global development goes from here, this conversation is for you.

Amie Vaccaro: All right. Welcome to the podcast. Hi, John

Jonathan Jackson: Hi, excited to have us

Amie Vaccaro: Nice to see you. This is one of the first episodes just us in a while. So excited to kind of catch up one-on-one,

Jonathan Jackson: Definitely. Yeah.

Amie Vaccaro: or one-to-many, I suppose, with the audience. But not exactly an intimate catch-up,

Jonathan Jackson: We can pretend it’s just you and I.

Amie Vaccaro: We can pretend. I think that’s the whole point of the podcast, as a medium.

So as we’re recording this, it’s late July 2026. It’ll probably get out a couple weeks later. I wanna hear, how are you feeling?

Jonathan Jackson: Oof. Big broad question there, Amy. I’m feeling really challenged with everything I see going on in the world broadly, but really excited by all the innovation and energy we still continue to see on people who are trying to figure out the best way to make impact in all sorts of environments.

I think the explosion of what AI has helped people do as individuals and as organizations has really empowered a lot of people. It’s also scary, and all of the concerns people have about AI are well-founded. But it’s really energized, I think a lot of people at Dimagi, a lot of people I see in the industry of, “Oh, there’s a lot of things that are possible that we as a firm couldn’t do yesterday that maybe we can stretch and take on today,” or, “I as an individual couldn’t do yesterday that I can take on and stretch.”

So it’s a moment of that excitement and then obviously there’s a lot of new wealth being created that people are saying, “Oh, if I had the opportunity to help direct how some of that new wealth got spent, I think I have an amazing idea,” or, “I think this other idea is amazing.” So it’s really this funny moment and this is coming on the heels of, basically 18 months of everybody just trying to survive.

So it’s also creating this really significant cognitive dissonance between how it’s felt to be in our industry for the last 18 months and still a lot of that going on, a lot of harm and challenges ahead but lots of excitement and energy as well. So it’s a very weird moment I’d say is one way to put it.

Plus I have two children and so summer’s a weird time always anyways ’cause your life seems to be constantly disrupted

Amie Vaccaro: Yeah, and I definitely see you as a leader who’s been very energized by AI. Like, You’re very much on the forefront of driving kind of an internal revolution with AI. I’m curious to hear what’s changed the most at Dimagi in the last year?

Jonathan Jackson: Oh I mean, we have had to really think hard about so many different premises that we’ve talked about on this podcast that we’ve talked about internally as a company. And spoke about this at length last year, but it really manifested in some structural changes the organization went through in the last 12 months, and also product changes, trying to say, “Are we offering something?”

And we can post back to the Kevin Starr episode, but I think he put it, good enough, cheap enough, and I forgot the third pillar. But for us, that cheap enough, that affordability question really rose quite quickly to the top of our minds when we were discussing what to do in response to the changing landscape and the changing ecosystem.

And so I’d say that’s probably one of the biggest changes we’ve thought about at Dimagi is how do we think about affordability of digital products and how do we think we’re meeting this moment in the market?

Amie Vaccaro: Yeah, I think the Kevin Starr framing was big enough, simple enough, cheap enough. Those three things coming together.

Jonathan Jackson: Yeah and, think cheap enough, you and I have talked about this in the context of all the thinking you’re doing on CommCare. Cheap enough, it’s a hard bar when you’re really thinking through the budgets of an organization or the budgets of a government who has extremely limited resources.

And being cheap enough, even if your product’s amazing, is a very significant bar to try to meet. And there’s just not a lot of money to go around. And so when you earnestly start looking at that for your product lines, for your business you come up with some very, very difficult answers as to what you wish you could charge versus what is plausible to charge in the market

Amie Vaccaro: I wanna come back to what you said a few sentences ago around cognitive dissonance of sort of moving from this world where, aid fell off a cliff to now this world where there’s this potential for new wealth coming on the scene. Share a little bit more about like what that feels like to hold both those realities right now within Dimagi.

Jonathan Jackson: It feels challenging, for sure. know, I think you hear me in, in just like our syncs that are not, publicly cast to the world of podcasting, but talking about wanting to be extremely aggressive on supporting all of our partners, all of our potential partners, the huge potential CommCare can have.

And then also, trying to hunker down, be like, “You just gotta at some point survive this moment and live to fight another day.” So it is really hard. And then with our other product lines, such as SharedHere and Connect, which are newer they’re both in growth mode, but with a lot of uncertainty ahead.

And I think that those are very challenging mental models to have. I think any organization who is both feeling like they have an amazing thing to contribute right now to the world, but also very uncertain odds as to, how much money they have to support their vision, is feeling a lot of these same tensions of, on the one hand, like now’s the moment.

Now is like a chance to really take a huge swing. And then also my, potential revenue next year could swing 50% in either direction. And I won’t know until I get very close to the deadline. So I think what we’re facing is not necessarily unique to Dimagi, but it’s something that a lot of organizations with really big and bold ideas right now and strong belief in what they’ve already done and what they continue to do.

I mean, that’s what’s so unique about-- That is one of the things that I think is unique about Dimagi right now, is we’ve got such significant proven impact with everything we’ve been doing over the last two decades. We know we provide immense value. We’ve changed our offerings to try to meet the moment to provide even more value, and we’re really excited by that.

And then we have these huge new projects that are trying to change how clinical trials work in all sorts of environments to make them more affordable and bring the right patients into to those trials and do science faster. And then Connect, which is our flagship new initiative, trying to really empower every local organization and frontline worker who wants to do additional work to be able to do so and get paid for doing so.

So we have these like extremely exciting, bold ideas that our teams are crunching on and doing amazing work. And , there’s just so much uncertainty ahead that as a leader and as a leadership team, we’re really trying to navigate balancing giving the support and instruction to the entire team of, now’s the moment we gotta go for it, and also like there’s just a lot of uncertainty out there.

Amie Vaccaro: Yeah, absolutely. And I wanna circle back in a few minutes on some of those big swings and especially Connect, which I think is so timely right now. But before we go there, I wanna check in with you about something that changed internally this year, which is that we changed one of our company values.

I wanna hear from you what was the old value and what’s the new value?

Jonathan Jackson: Yeah. So, This was kind of a really interesting discussion because as we talked about when we first launched the podcast, and I encourage everybody to go back and listen to those values episodes, you came in, Amy and helped us build out these values. They were kind of unstated at the time.

You did an amazing job working with the team and our values committee to articulate these. And I got really excited when we finally landed on these. And one of my favorites was the one that we changed, you know and one that you didn’t like initially which was embrace complexity for impact.

And that’s something that I am really proud was our value up until it wasn’t. And we’ve shifted that value into solving the right problems for impact. And the reason we felt like it was really important to name this change as an organization within our values is really kind of building on that affordability question that we talked about just earlier in this episode.

Are we building something that a government can afford or that a nonprofit can afford or whoever the target customer is at a price they can pay and that we think they should want to pay? We just had Eric Ries on our podcast talking about his new book, “Incorruptible,” and I highlighted how much I loved this one part of his book where he talks about a sales transaction is not just, oh, we got money.

Dimagi got profit ’cause we sold CommCare to someone or we sold Connect to someone. It’s we sold it for way less than it’s actually worth to them. I get so excited every time we close a new $60,000 per year electronic community health information system customer on CommCare ’cause they’re getting a national scale digital health tool for all of their community health workers for $60,000.

I think that should be worth a million dollars. So we just created $940,000 of free value for the world at a price point we hope we can support, at a price point they want to pay for. And that’s part of what the right problem is as opposed to solving every problem or really embracing complexity, which was our mantra before.

We were like, “We are in this to win it. We’re in this for impact. We need to do everything we possibly can to help the community health system, to help the government, to get all the resources we can from funders.” And with this big shift and with this change in our values, we kind of said, “Look, we can’t do everything.

We have to accept that. We can’t solve every problem. We can’t be all things to all people. What is our optimal place in this ecosystem? How do we provide immense, sustainable, expanding value?” And that was a really very challenging mindset shift internally ’cause I’m so proud of all the work we’ve done over the last two decades going the extra mile.

One of our, one of our division level values used to literally be go the extra mile for the last mile. And these types of mantras are absolutely who we are, and it’s not like they went away, but we need to pour that same energy into are we solving the right problem? Does it scale? Does it align to our high impact growth framework?

And being really honest with ourselves, that does mean there’s certain problems that just They’re really important problems. They are solvable, but you can’t afford to solve them. And that’s a really sad thing to accept, but is just true. And for us at least, we wanted to embody that new thinking in our value

Amie Vaccaro: Yeah, I really appreciate that explanation. And it’s so interesting, as you were sharing that and I was reflecting back on how the embrace complexity for impact was definitely my least favorite value

Jonathan Jackson: Oh, I know. You might have mentioned it once or twice,

Amie Vaccaro: I think I, I think it’s actually in the podcast episode about the values, so I was not, not hiding that one.

Um, But it does seem like that change is part of adopting more fully this product approach, right? That we’re, like, offering products that are off the shelf versus walking alongside our partners to do every single possible customization to make something perfectly work for them, which can cost can be not affordable for anyone.

So I think , this makes a ton of sense. What has that looked like? How do you manage that change internally in changing this mindset and changing , this value?

Jonathan Jackson: I mean, I think it’s a journey and it’s hard for me personally, ’cause as, as I said, like that was my favorite value. I took a ton of pride in we’re willing to do the things nobody else is going to, and that’s where we’re gonna create the most impact. And I think shifting that value though, I still think we are trying to be able to do something unique or relatively unique in saying, “How do we find the exact repeatable value that we think our partners can afford and should want to afford?”

’Cause that’s the other thing. You can say, “Oh, I can offer you this for a million dollars,” but do you really in your heart of hearts think the government should spend a million dollars on the thing you built for them, or do you think they should spend it elsewhere? And that was also why it was so exciting to me when we landed on this $60,000 eCHIS offering I keep mentioning, because I do think a government who wants to digitize their community health workforce or who wants to technology enable a frontline workforce should really be excited to spend that money on the product we wanna offer them.

And I haven’t necessarily felt that is true about all of our projects at all of the budget levels we’ve been asking for historically. You know, I’m like, “Great,” “there’s a lot of money here. Let’s do a great project together.” But is this the most important use of that funding? We never really grappled with that decision historically, ’cause I think we were all just trying to keep pushing with the previous ecosystem, and that’s really brought this mindset to the forefront.

But I think a lot of product mindsets are also saying, “I have confidence in the value I’m providing. I have confidence that it’s worth X, and if you don’t agree, we can just agree to disagree.” I think the mindset in the previous industry was like, “Oh, I have to convince you to want what I’m offering you so I can get a funder to come in and fund the project together.”

Whereas we’ve had a lot more discussions where we’re like, this is the properties of what we’re offering. We think it’s definitely worth this. We think it’s worth a whole lot more. If you’re interested, that’s great. If not, we get it, and we’re not gonna try to convince you to change your mind.“ And I think that’s been a growing up process for us as Dimagi as well, ’cause a lot of our time used to go into like convincing you to agree with us, and now we’re ”Look, this is it. If it’s a priority, let’s talk. If it’s not, we get it.“

Amie Vaccaro: Yeah. it’s almost like the disappearance of the aid allows for a more market-driven approach, right? Where like the decision is made based on value and the ability to pay from the same entity versus us going to like a third party of funder that will come in and swoop in and make it happen and pay that big price tag.

Jonathan Jackson: Absolutely. And I think so much of this also, you and I have talked about this internally with some of the changes you’ve been able to lead here. But if your only way to get this to work at Dimagi is to both charge me a bunch of money and make it my top priority as the CEO, I get that’s the offer, but that’s a big ask.

I have a lot of things fighting for top priority. If you’re offering me something that’s maybe only 80% I want, but just works, that you’re claiming you can do it without me having to put a lot of time into it, that’s a much different offer than, ”Oh, I have to make it my number one priority,“ just like when we’re talking to a minister of health.

If we’re saying, ”Your implementation of CommCare has got to be a huge priority,“ that’s way different than saying, ”Oh, no, this is now really baked. We’ve got it down to a, a clear science of what’s configurable, what you need to care about, and we are ready to go, and it doesn’t need to be a top priority.“

We’re hoping that’s an appealing pitch in a way that maybe wasn’t that appealing two years ago.

Amie Vaccaro: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love that framing. I wanna come back to earlier we were talking about some of the big swings that we’re making right now being an interesting moment to make a big swing. And one of the biggest changes within Dimagi since I’ve been at Dimagi has been the launch of Connect.

So for someone who maybe hasn’t listened to other podcast episodes, hasn’t been on our website, and has never heard of Connect, what is Connect?

Jonathan Jackson: , So excited about Connect. Connect is our new platform that enables funders or governments to fund new verified service delivery with local organizations or frontline workers who are delivering more services to the community for more pay. And so the thing that we think is so exciting about Connect is it aggregates this amazing capability of local organizations and local frontline providers who are already doing great work into a two-sided marketplace where we’re matching funders who wanna deliver outcomes and wanna buy outcomes and amazing local actors who can deliver them.

And we connect those two, and the secret is verified service delivery. Because of all the work we’ve been doing with technology and digital health and CommCare, we have the ability to pinpoint every single service that’s happening to verify it in real time and to make sure that frontline worker gets paid for only the services they’re delivering, but every service they’re delivering.

And it’s so exciting because we’re getting more money into the hands of people doing amazing work, and we hope we’re meeting this moment where funders want more cost efficiency and more accountability in the ecosystem. And as you said, Amy, we’ve been working on this for years. It wasn’t in response to these changes of USAID or other changes in the global landscape.

This is something that was already an ongoing initiative for multiple years before we saw these changes in the marketplace

Amie Vaccaro: That’s beautiful. Yeah, there was an article I was reading recently. It was heartbreaking. It was an NPR piece where they were following the stories of folks whose death could be tied to the stopping of USAID funding. And all the stories were tied to a health worker, a frontline health worker,

and just sort of reinforced for me the importance of these, these frontline workers in delivering the services that are needed. So yeah, that’s really beautiful. And I think this shift in paying for what happened versus what might be planned is also a major shift, right? In how, In how this model comes to light.

Jonathan Jackson: Absolutely. And we’ve had Mark and Ordera on the podcast before, and we’ve talked to so many amazing CHWs. Like anybody who has worked with community health workers knows how impactful they are, knows the amazing work they’re doing, knows that the organizations who support community health workers are also doing phenomenal work.

But there is a lot of skepticism on how aid dollars get spent, where it’s actually going, and we’re hoping Connect can be one of those answers where you can spend with confidence $100 million a year, $200 million a year, and know where every single dollar went. That’s our dream. And if that works, that means lots of community health workers already doing this amazing work are gonna have a lot more money, and the local organizations supporting them will as well.

Amie Vaccaro: That’s incredible. And can you walk me through what does one Connect-enabled visit look like?

Jonathan Jackson: Oh yeah, this is the super exciting part. So it’s built on top of our CommCare platform. So we already have a quarter million active CommCare users all across the world. And the idea is you already have a smartphone, you already have CommCare installed, and you can receive new Connect opportunities to opt into to deliver additional services in your community.

So you’re Amy, you’re working in rural Rwanda, rural Kenya. You get a push notification on your device saying ”A new opportunity to do early childhood development has been offered in your community. Would you like to opt in to deliver these household-based services?“ If you opt in, you then go through a digital learning curriculum.

You pass tests that are digital. Once you pass those, a human supervisor goes out and watches you do a home visit to ensure that you’re doing it correctly and with quality, and then you’re authorized to go out and deliver these early childhood development visits or kangaroo mother care or vitamin A distribution.

We have over 10 different opportunities that have already been developed and delivered through Connect. And as you do those, you’re using CommCare and Connect in real time at the household. So you’re able to record everything you’re doing. You’re able to take pictures of certain aspects of the visit so that they can later be verified.

Once you’re done with that visit using the digital device in real time, that information’s all gonna go back to Connect. We’re gonna run our algorithms against it to verify the visit was done properly, there’s no fraud that you’re doing it with the right quality, and then you’re gonna get paid and you’re gonna see your earnings in real time on your phone.

So you get to walk up to a household, maybe do your day job and other activities, and then do your Connect opportunity, support that family, feel empowered to do that, and then in real time get a notification that visit was verified and that you earned more money

Amie Vaccaro: That’s amazing. And to date, how many of these services have been delivered in this way, and what kind of feedback have we heard from folks who’ve delivered them?

Jonathan Jackson: Yeah. So we’ve done over a million and a half verified service delivery visits, which is super exciting. We have over 200 locally led organizations that have expressed interest in taking on Connect opportunities. We’ve already been able to contract with over 50 of them. The demand is, as far as we can tell, like extremely high for local organizations to be able to take on these types of verified service delivery contracts.

And the opt-in rate when local organizations support their frontline workforce to be offered these opportunities is above 80%. So the demand from the community health worker, the demand from the local organization, both very, very high. That’s why we’re so excited by the potential to solve what some people are thinking about as an absorption problem.

If you are a billionaire trying to deploy $100 million, where can you do it? How can you do it? How can you trust that the services are really reaching those most in need? That’s something that we think Connect can hopefully be one of the solutions to.

Amie Vaccaro: Yeah, and I’d actually love to like, drill into that a little bit because as you were speaking, I know there’s this question in this moment of time, which is, okay, there’s new money coming. People are speaking of new money coming that should hopefully get funneled to philanthropy, at least pieces of it.

But can the existing infrastructure absorb money in a good way, in an impactful way? And so I’m curious to hear your answer there when it comes to Connect. Is Connect ready to absorb a $100 million check tomorrow? Like, how does that look?

Jonathan Jackson: Yeah we think absolutely. There’s evidence-based interventions that have already been demonstrated and deployed through the platform. There’s always more ongoing evidence that people are going to want to generate, and we’re actively doing multiple studies on how coverage is affected when you use Connect.

Are you getting the every household in a given area or just the households close to the road? We’re looking at baseline mortality that has a significant weighting on the cost effectiveness of doing things like trying to save underweight newborns. So there’s a lot of work still to do on the evidence generation, but at its core, all of the technology has been proven.

We’ve deployed it across 10 different opportunities from reading glass distribution to small and vulnerable newborn care. So we’re pretty confident in the, the core elements of the platform, and we think there’s huge absorptive capacity by aggregating all the capabilities of these local frontline workers and local organizations.

So yes, we’re excited and there’ll obviously be a ramp-up period as there would be with any intervention that is scaling rapidly. But we’ve already raised tens of millions of dollars to both fund the technology and the, the programs that are running through Connect, and we think we could easily deploy $100 million through the platform

Amie Vaccaro: That’s awesome. And I’m also curious I’m guessing there will be funders that will be thinking about what’s shovel-ready, right? Where can I invest and get an impact like today? And then other funders that are maybe thinking more about how might I create XYZ outcome. Do you see Connect as a vehicle for both of those types of funders or more for the kind of shovel-ready folks?

Jonathan Jackson: It’s nuanced, and you and I have talked about this of like who could be the, the flagship funders of a platform like Connect. And I do think it’s a both narrative here because we think we can create that direct impact today. For a dollar per household visit or 50 cents, depending on the region or intervention type, you get that direct impact and it’s verified.

It’s more evidence that service actually happened than we have in most programs today, if not all programs. So we’re really excited by just the direct impact each dollar gets going through the platform. But at its core, one of the things that excites me so much about Connect is it’s also creating a new model where performing well matters.

We’re creating a system where because you performed well yesterday, you get offered more opportunity today. And I think that the lack of high performance having a reward mechanism in our industry and in many public sector services in general is a huge problem. And so we hope we’re also contributing to this big idea of at its core, if you just reward high performance, lots of stuff can get fixed.

And again, we think verified service delivery is the secret unlock that allows you to easily reward high performance. Like that’s not a novel thought. Lots of people have been trying to think about how to reward high performance, but we think - verified service delivery is a unique unlock for how you can do that at scale.

Amie Vaccaro: So How does this all differ from how aid has like typically worked?

Jonathan Jackson: Great question, although very complex , to get back to you. But as you kind of stated so beautifully, a lot of what happens historically and how aid gets distributed is through these big project budgets. And so we write a beautiful grant, we promise to do a bunch of activities, the funder picks us as a one or several to go do that, and then we’re doing a project.

No matter how well we do that project, no matter how well our subcontractors do that project, there might be no more potential money. And therefore, it creates a significant disincentive to go the extra mile to try your best. So when we talked a lot internally about how to budget allocate or how much effort to put into a project, we were literally talking about how we’re doing it in spite of the market incentives,we wanna do a great job on this project because it’s meaningful to us and we’re an impact-driven organization, but the market is actually asking for the opposite. We should minimize the amount of effort we’re putting into this project and move on. And so with Connect, it’s the exact opposite. You want more opportunity from Connect.

You want more ability to earn more money to deliver more services in your community. So when you do a better job today, the system knows it and can offer you even more work tomorrow. And I think that’s just such a great ecosystem to build. And if we can get there I think we’re gonna see this, this really healthy positive feedback loop where you want more work, therefore you do better today, and it’s just a cycle

Amie Vaccaro: I love that. The other thing that I was sort of pulling even from our website is around the amount of the money that actually goes to the local organization and the local worker. There’s a stat on our site around like 10% of foreign assistance, US foreign assistance ever reached a local organization, and CONNECT totally changes that. Can you talk me through that a bit?

Jonathan Jackson: I think I wanna caveat that -- there’s a lot of statistics that have tried to do that analysis and it is very subject to what counts as, reaching the local level. But I think it’s unquestionable that the people who are at the front lines doing the core work of delivering these services into their communities, whether that’s a community health worker or somebody else, are often almost always underpaid and very often not paid.

We ask them to volunteer their time to carry out the intervention. We want Connect to be a very significant shift in that ecosystem, so we are trying to make sure 80 cents on the dollar is reaching the local frontline worker, the local organization, or paying for commodities. And only 20% is spent doing technology R&D or program management.

And that’s a very significant shift for us to try to meet that benchmark, but it would be significant for the entire industry to try to meet that benchmark as well.

Amie Vaccaro: Yeah, that’s awesome. Okay, so for every dollar that goes through this platform, 20% for tech and project management, which is what Dimagi’s offering, and then 80% to that local org and the community health worker for delivering that service. Yeah. This might be a naive question other people tried this before? Like, why doesn’t this already exist?

Jonathan Jackson: Is not a naive question it’s a great question actually, ’cause it does sound pretty good, when I pitch this, even when I’m talking to you right now, I’m getting like more excited, about, about it ’cause I just I love the philosophy and the elements of it. The idea of doing more pay for performance has been around forever, and not just in global health, not just in global development.

Lots of sectors have tried to do more pay for performance and more outcomes incentives. It’s just really hard. It’s hard to have the ability to do it efficiently. It’s hard to have the ability to do it reliably, and it’s hard to have the ability to push the accountability down to the local level where it belongs.

I was a big kind of naysayer about development impact bonds because the overhead of doing those transactions is enormous and they feel pretty top -down when you do these. And so I think part of what we’re hoping to do with Connect is make this easy and also make it bottom up. Right now, Dimagi has been the developer and the designer of many of the programs we’ve done.

We heard about them from experts in the field and we collaborate, but a lot of the kind of decision to do Kangaroo Care at scale was based on us talking to amazing organizations who are already doing this and being like, ”Yeah, this sounds like something we can do with Connect.“ But our dream is that Dimagi’s not even in the loop on which programs make sense to deliver through Connect.

Our local partners are coming up with them, and we just had the first example of this in a really exciting way where one of our Connect network members said, ”Hey, we’re having a local cholera outbreak. Do you have funding to make it available that we can go out and do ORS packet distribution?“ That’s oral rehydration salts and do a lot of the same elements that we’ve been doing on our child health campaigns.

We took that ask out to our funder network and we found somebody to be willing to fund their verified service delivery. And so that’s our hope with this two-sided marketplace is that story happens more and more. So yeah, I’m really excited by that potential as well.

Amie Vaccaro: I’m really glad you shared that story, John, ’cause I think that’s always been one of my fears with this, is that the model becomes too donor-led, right? And we kind of end up doing whatever the donor wants. And I love that story because that’s actually an example where the or- the local organization that’s on the ground and knows that, okay, cholera, we’re dealing with cholera right now, we need help.

And they’re able to come to us, and then we’re able to go to the funders and then figure out how to pull that together. So it’s exciting to think that more of aid could be happening in that way too.

Jonathan Jackson: Absolutely. Absolutely

So Amy you’ve been asking me a bunch of questions, but I’m curious ’cause you, you were here from the beginning. You helped me come up with a name for it and everything. - How did it sound to you, having been on the inside when we were coming up with this?

Were you like, ”Oh, this is a spin on a different thing. I kinda get why this could be appealing, but like I don’t quite get why it’d be different“? Or were you like oh, this is different. Like I can see how this this could be, this could really change something”?

Amie Vaccaro: Yeah, great question. I mean, I think from day one since speaking with you, John you’re a large part of the reason I joined Dimagi, obviously. And I remember in our very earliest conversations, you being so frustrated about all the things that were broken in development. And me coming from-- I wa- I was coming from a larger tech company, not working in the aid space at all.

I was sort of shocked just to hear how clearly things were not working in this space. And I think when you originally started talking about this idea it really clicked. I thought, “Okay, wow, this is the antidote to everything you’ve been saying about just over-reliance on these hefty, long, unwieldy projects and more kind of like atomized version of aid delivery.”

So I think I’ve been really excited to see it come to life and to see folks kind of catching on to believing in that vision, right? I think a huge kudos to the Steel Foundation for Hope for really seeing the potential here. And I will say though, I think my number one concern or area of curiosity has always been that directionality question of what happens-- what does this look like How do we make sure that local orgs are still in control, and that they’re really the heart of this program. And I think it’s tricky, right? When we’re sort of the, we’re the intermediary we need to get the funds in, right? Like nothing can happen without the funds. So we actually need to really care and value and work very closely with funders. But I also think like that connection to the local organization is the most important piece here, and that ability for them to come to us with ideas and to help it spin in that opposite direction just seems so, so important.

And I think for me, I was really lucky in that I was able to spend time with one of our Connect partners Kikapu Gardens. They’re incredible. We’ll link to the video that came out of that, that visit in the show notes. And just see like the passion, the energy sort of, and also the gratitude from that team, right?

To be seen and to be getting access to funds to do the work that they wanted to do and knew that their community needed. And so I think making sure that what we’re delivering through Connect aligns to what’s needed in the community just feels really important to me.

Jonathan Jackson: That’s awesome. Did you have any like nuggets you remember from that trip in Kenya when you were out with- out in the

Amie Vaccaro: Yeah. I mean, I remember one, one, it was just, it was beautiful to witness. It just really was amazing to see how hard , these teams were working. And they really, they pulled together a whole day where we could kind of go door to door. I think we went to nine different homes and got to see the whole end-to-end kind of services being delivered, the, the children, the app being used.

It was really beautiful. And I think one of the things though that, that did strike me from those visits And nobody said this outright, but I could sense it, is as a health worker working with Connect, right? You’re like, “Okay, I’ve got this opportunity. I’ve got, $2 to go and deliver these, this set of interventions that we know are gonna be really valuable to this one f- to the door to door in this community.”

And then you show up in this home, and you can tell, the, the community visits I was watching, they were the child health campaign, so it was vitamin A malnutrition screening vaccine coaching, and a, a handful of other interventions in one. And you could see that more than that was needed, right?

This household needed money, needed food, needed a lot of assistance, right? And instead, the health worker’s coming in and saying, “This is what I can offer you.” And you might not even know that you need a vitamin A supplementation right now. You don’t even know what this is about, and I need to educate you on what it’s about and get you to want it and take it.

And I realized that is so hard, right? We say these are, like, these simple, you know-- we don’t say they’re simple, but we’re paying for these visits a couple dollars per pop, but every visit requires building that trust from that family and also educating them and holding the fact that they need more than that, that felt really palpable to me.

Jonathan Jackson: Yeah that’s such an amazing story and that’s part of the hope too with how we think about Connect and how we wanna empower the frontline worker and that household is it shouldn’t just be one intervention at $2 that they’re doing. It should be a suite of interventions that all layer on. One of the core premises of Connect was like, look we spent two decades as Dimagi building out trust with these local organizations, really understanding the field, building amazing technology. There’s so much more these amazing local organizations and frontline workers can be doing if they can be funded and unlocked to do so. And that’s what’s so exciting is exactly as you said, Amy. So you’re like, “Okay, great.” Now that organization can come back to us and say, “Look, they do need this additional nutrition supplementation program.”

And now we’re working with other funders on doing nutrition work and so that’s definitely the hope is that these stack and integrate. And integration is a huge buzzword within the industry right now, both because there’s more money to do less, but also just ’cause it makes sense. Like it’s not like a household needs just one thing.

So yeah, like I love that and that’s definitely something that excites me about the potential of Connect as well.

Amie Vaccaro: Yeah. Yeah, and I think some of the other things were like just seeing how much would go into the local or kind of spinning up the campaign and then realizing sometimes these campaigns are starting and stopping based on the funding, right? And just realizing like there’s more to be done. And so the, the power of like keeping the funding flowing was really top of mind for me also.

Jonathan Jackson: touched on this idea of how do we further empower the local organizations, and that’s one of the things that excites me so much about the potential for generative AI, is now a lot of the stuff I’m prototyping and building with the team is like, “Hey, Amy, you’re running a local organization in Kenya.

You have this idea of like a new connect opportunity, like how do you add that nutrition supplementation? Can I give you an AI agent that you can interact with and be like, ’I wanna go prototype this whole connect opportunity end to end.’” And pre-AI, you needed to be an expert CommCare app builder. You needed to be an expert connect configuration person.

You needed to be able to do a lot of steps. And now we’re hoping that we can build these tools to really put in the hands of these local organizations and say, “You tell us what your ideas are, and we’ll see if the AI can assist you in coming up with like kind of a complete prototype where you can then go out to the field and get real in-context user feedback from your frontline workers and clients on does this intervention make sense?

Would you wanna deliver this household after household?” And we’ve already prototyped this with some malaria work we’re doing. We’re about to do this with livelihoods interventions. And it’s really exciting because it, it’s producing some pretty exciting results already, and we’re kind of early on in, in developing the system.

Amie Vaccaro: , Just to kind of bring that down to earth, like can you share what does that look like for the malaria work that you just mentioned? What is-- how does that

Jonathan Jackson: Yeah. So one of the ideas that GiveWell had in a recent request for information that they set out was testing post-market malaria rapid diagnostic tests. These are plastic dipsticks that, that help do a rapid diagnostic test, and they wanna surveil whether these are still working six months, 12 months after they’re, on a shelf in a store.

And so you need mystery shoppers to go out and buy these. You need to tag them, you need to put temperature sensors with them as you move them back to the lab for rigorous testing. And so we had this idea of saying, “Well, we kind of know how Connect could support this in theory, but let’s see if we can just go do it with our AI system.”

So I sent in an email to the AI system saying, “Hey, I wanna develop this quick opportunity. I want it to be really small, just a few thousand dollars to go trial this. I just wanna test feasibility. Can you create me a Connect opportunity that has the app and the seven fields we wanna go fill out when we’re collecting from the pharmacy?

Can you offer this to our local network? Can they opt in to doing it, get paid for doing it?” And so I used AI to kind of automate each one of those steps individually and then chain them together in a way that it was kind of like my project manager. Can you go run this program for me? And not every step worked, perfectly, and I had to go edit it a bunch, but it was like really exciting to be like, “Oh, wait, I can see where this could go.”

I could see being here in my office in Denver or you in your office in Boston and be like, “Oh, this organization just had this great idea. Can we pilot it?” And take all the months of human labor that’s currently going into that and having the AI be able to do a quick V1 on, so many different attributes.

Then again, we’ve talked about this a lot in our AI related content, but not to replace the humans doing it, but the-- to then allow the humans to be one level up, not doing the manual labor of creating the apps, but really interacting with the local organizations, interpreting the feedback and improving the application.

So super excited by that.

Amie Vaccaro: That’s really cool. Yeah, it feels like in so many places with AI, it’s allowing folks that used to be like the subject matter experts that were like in the work day-to-day, right? So someone in this case, in a past world within Dimagi, that would’ve been someone on the team who’s an app builder, right?

Building out the app kind of painstakingly in CommCare, instead, now it’s all, that part’s AI-enabled, so now that human can be overseeing it. , It’s cool to see that sort of like up-leveling. Cool and a lot of things at once. Cool is probably like a, a simplification of the

Jonathan Jackson: yeah. For, for anybody listening that is scared by that, we are too. So I think, you and I have talked about this in the context of marketing and in the context of like our podcast production and e-even, we brainstorm a use case of “Hey, wait, I want an AI to listen to everything I say and be like, ‘Am I being interesting? Am I being a good host? How can I improve?’” So there’s so many different things like that that for me at least personally, like I’m going nuts right now trying to play around with these things. And not everything’s gonna work, and it’s scary some of the stuff that does work.

And the implications for the workforce writ large are obviously massive. But for putting more power into the hands of the experts and enabling them to be able to visualize what they want in their head and manifest it on our platforms, that’s something that really excites me.

Amie Vaccaro: I think that’s a really cool way to frame it, is like more power into the hands of an expert. I am curious to hear-- So in all of that, how are you as, as Dimagi’s leader, , who’s very well-versed in AI at this point, and obviously no one’s like an expert ’cause it changes every single day.

What are some of the guardrails that you’re putting in place? And I think as you were sharing that example, I was like, “Wow, that’s cool.” And also it’s kind of scary to think, right, that like an AI could put together this thing that then is like creating an RFP where actual local orgs are like reading it and did a human even review it, right?

What are some of the ways that you’re making sure that we’re doing this in a thoughtful way and able to kind of, stay in control of our AIs, I suppose?

Jonathan Jackson: Yeah. Well, I think for us I, I’ve been a huge advocate of just trying stuff. So I think for one of the things that we’re doing, it’s trying as much as you can, as fast as you can, because as you said, Amy, the field is moving so fast, the capabilities are evolving so much, it’s always important just to try to learn and interact with it as much as you can, just like you would like a overeager junior employee that you’re trying to train up, ?

It’s just like you gotta put in the effort. You gotta put in all of the, the time into your weekly syncs, and you gotta do a good job, and you gotta teach them skills. And that’s how I kind of view what I’m doing right now is anything I would do with like just a, a highly competent junior employee that I wanted to be very successful at Dimagi.

The other thing is, as we think about it, is about whether AI can be used potentially to automate roles, not people, so can we get the CommCare app building part or the Connect configuration part that’s like rote manual labor into the platform sometimes and leave the humans to have the judgment,so-- can you decouple those? And sometimes the answer is no. A lot of the judgment comes from well, no, the way this really works is when I’m doing the, the building process, I didn’t write down everything in my head in a document before I built it. I’m like thinking about it in real time as I’m building.

And so in those cases, AI really can’t decouple those two pieces. And so looking and thinking about how certain things work, how different people work is also fascinating. But I think for us, like AI’s nowhere good enough to replace the judgment part of it. So to your point, I would never want to release an RFP where we weren’t committed to reviewing the responses.

I don’t think that’s fair to the people writing, and I don’t think it’s appropriate to believe an AI could do a good job. And in fact, we’ve seen with Connect the better written proposals that would’ve been like classically good proposals were not that correlated to who performed the best. And that’s the other really exciting thing about Connect is rather than having to have a lot of good judgment as a human, you replace it with evidence from the ground.

So rather than saying, “Oh, does Amy or John know how to build a better malaria bed net app?” We say, “Let’s not ask that question.” Let’s say, “How quickly can we get the malaria bed net app out to the community so they can decide if it makes sense and if it’s good?” So I think one thing AI can do is, one, move where the judgment is happening, and two, make the judgment much easier to obtain and then iterate on.

Amie Vaccaro: That’s awesome. All right. Last question for you, John. What is the biggest change you wanna see in global development?

Jonathan Jackson: I want to see everybody who’s funding global development, who’s implementing global development, who’s affected by global development, to believe that high performance is gonna be rewarded. I think this is something Connect’s trying to do. We’re not the only ones, though. And I think if you do this, it really is an important psychological shift in how everybody should be expecting everybody else to behave.

And it’s a world I just wanna live in. I want people who are doing great work to be rewarded to do more great work. And so for me, that’s really the, the crux of what we’re doing here in Connect. And this thinking around calling it high performance, I’m still working with the language and toying with that, but this idea of just like there’s so many people doing amazing work.

And this is true across so many sectors: teachers, government workers, nonprofit workers, for-profit workers. This is true everywhere. It’s not unique to our problem, but that’s the world I think is exciting. To play a role in helping to make that come to life and to help make that come to life specifically for community health workers and frontline workers and local organizations, I’ll be really excited if we can contribute to that change and how the ecosystem functions.

Amie Vaccaro: I love that. Yeah, so kind of creating an, a performance mindset when it comes to delivering these essential services on the front lines. Yeah.

Jonathan Jackson: Absolutely. Well, this is awesome. Maybe we should do private chats more often that we

Amie Vaccaro: I know this

Jonathan Jackson: the whole world.

Amie Vaccaro: Yeah. Thank you, John. Appreciate it.

Jonathan Jackson: Thanks, Amy

Amie Vaccaro: A big thanks to John for letting me grill him one-on-one and for turning the tables halfway through. And thank you for listening. Here’s a few things I’m taking away from this conversation. First, solve the right problems. Hard isn’t the point, impact is. A problem can be important and solvable and still not be affordable to solve, and naming that honestly is what lets you pour your energy where it can move the needle Second, pay for what happened, not what was planned.

Verified service delivery, what Dimagi is offering with our Connect platform, means a funder can see every visit and where every dollar got spent in real time. And eighty cents of every dollar goes to the local organizations, frontline workers, and commodities doing the actual work. Third, reward high performance.

When doing a great job today earns you more opportunity tomorrow, you fix the incentive that’s been broken in aid for decades.

And fourth, use AI to automate roles, not people, so the experts closest to the community spend less time on manual configuration and more time on the very important work of applying human judgment

That’s our show. Please rate, review, subscribe, and share this episode if you found it useful. It really helps us grow our impact. And write to us at podcast@dimagi.com with any ideas, comments, or feedback. This show is executive produced by myself. Prathana Balachandar and Michelle Valencia are our editors.

Natalia Glowacky is our producer, and cover art is by Sudhanshu Kanth. A final note in the spirit of transparency, we use AI to assist with guest research, copywriting, and post-production, so a small team can produce a high-quality show. All AI-assisted content is reviewed and edited by humans, and we retain full responsibility for what you hear