Iaso (it’s iaso, not laso, damn sans-serif fonts)

A product I started more than 3 years ago now.

Based on an open source form engine, ODK, we built an offline-working data collection tool that is structured around organisational hierarchies (think Province - Region - District).

It’s now used in Africa health financing, in multiple facility/location census activities (it turns out that the world is not fully mapped out yet) and at WHO for monitoring polio vaccination campaigns.

In the process of creating Iaso, we built managing tools for organisational hierarchies and their geo data, which is now referred to as a Georegistry.

We are now building the next step, when you have a data collection app and a curated list of locations: a tool to assign missions (e.g. household vaccinations) in large teams of teams and monitor the execution of these assignments.

We’re often trying to replace paper based efforts in this process called microplanning.

In 3 years, we went from a team of 2 on a 2 months project to having now 10 developers working on Iaso, thousands of users, and large institutions adopting the tool.

We are currently building the new beneficiary support tool for the World Food Programme with Iaso and it was just approved as a digital public good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance: app.digitalpublicgoods.net/a/10264

The jury is still out on this, but this might end up to be the most impactful project of my career.

Our current introduction slide deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KwTOYjhpZpD_Kxb94MI-1RRW6ElsNUBcex_c5ZfV1xU/edit?usp=sharing

Github: github.com/BLSQ/iaso

The company: www.bluesquarehub.com