Smartphone-based field surveys

Football for Water, Ghana,
using Akvo FLOW
Smartphone-based field surveys
Akvo FLOW
Map, monitor and evaluate infrastructure, social issues, interventions and services –
or anything else.
Akvo FLOW is affordable, reliable and highly scalable. It uses smartphones to dramatically
improve the ease, speed and accuracy of data collection.
What
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An internet and Android smartphone tool for collecting,
evaluating and displaying any amount of geographically
referenced data
Lets you map and analyse situations on the ground and
monitor changes over time
Why
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Dramatically increases speed and accuracy of data
collection
Makes field survey enumerators’ jobs much easier
Greatly helps to co-ordinate large-scale data collection
exercises
Easy to publish, share and analyse information
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Affordable, reliable and highly scalable
Designed to work in remote areas lacking basic
infrastructure
How
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Well-designed, multi-lingual, online dashboard lets you
manage your data collection and visualise your findings
FLOW Android app can conduct surveys in any language
Continuous monitoring feature lets you track data points
over time
Works in remote locations without cell phone coverage
Full training and support provided
Who is using FLOW?
Dashboard
More than 200 organisations, including national
governments, multi-lateral aid agencies and small and large
NGOs are using FLOW to monitor water and sanitation
points, health and education services, agricultural practices,
food security within communities, wildlife populations and
more. Over a million data points have been mapped to date.
The FLOW dashboard makes it simple to create and
distribute surveys; review and clean incoming data; export
reports, maps and histograms; and manage user roles and
permissions.
Manual data collection is cumbersome
Until now, staff needed to carry GPS, cameras and papers
into the field. Forms were manually re-entered into
computers leading to errors. Data was locked away in
spreadsheets. Results were not visible or accessible and
were hard to measure.
Akvo FLOW changes all that.
Maximum survey flexibility
Teams can create simple or complex questionnaires on any
topic. Surveys can gather different types of data including
text and numbers, photos, videos and barcodes. Dependent
questions can be used to customise survey paths based on
a respondent’s answers. Cascading questions can reliably
capture multi-level data such as administrative boundaries.
Monitoring features let you track and update data points
over time.
Link teams together
Smartphone
The FLOW field survey app lets you conduct surveys in any
language using Android smartphones, even when you’re out
of signal range. The data uploads automatically whenever
network coverage resumes. GPS accurately records the
location of each data point.
Akvo FLOW helps teams of remote field workers stay in
touch with programme managers and experts who may not
be nearby. As data is collected, it can be viewed and
analysed in real time by many team members in large
numbers of locations. The feedback loop is shortened,
making programmes work better and faster.
Akvo FLOW Collect good data. Make good decisions.
About Akvo
Akvo builds open source Internet and mobile software that is used to make international development
cooperation and aid activity more effective and transparent. We provide the software as a service to our
partners, backed by a partner-support and training team.
Akvo Foundation
Netherlands Jeroen van der Sommen +31 (0) 65 180 20 41 [email protected] Lissy van Noort +31 (0)20 820 0175 [email protected]
East Africa Luuk Diphoorn +254 (0)7 087 83 366 [email protected] West Africa Emeline Bereziat +226 75 97 06 69 [email protected]
South Asia Isha Parihar +91 9810213633 [email protected] South East Asia Frodo van Oostveen +65 81869264 [email protected]
Akvo Foundation USA
North, Central and South America Henry Jewell +1 703 987 0188 [email protected]