MOU between World Vision and Save the Children to scale-up a pilot on digital school attendance tracking

As the Somali Response Innovation was established in 2018 in response to the internal displacement of populations, World Vision Somalia submitted the first challenge into the MatchMaker platform inquiring about solutions to track student attendance that helped understand barriers students faced in attending school.

Through the MatchMaker process, the RIL identified a couple of innovations that showed promise. WV selected the Digital Attendance App (DAA), and through a feasibility study, the innovation was contextualized to the response. In 2019, the innovation was then piloted in three World Vision-supported schools in Puntland.

The pilot successfully concluded in 2020, and plans for scaling were put on hold due to the pandemic. In late 2020, Save the Children came across the innovation as they were working with the Puntland MoE to develop a dashboard at the ministry level. A discussion began on how learnings from the WV pilot could be incorporated into Save the Children’s work. Through these conversations, the opportunity arose to link DAA that was collecting data in real-time, with Save the Children’s piloted system that allowed allows the MoE to see the updates across their portfolio.

In June 2021, WV and SC signed an MOU to make the systems interoperable, and to scale up the pilot to 21 WV and 21 SC supported schools in Puntland.