Slide 1

TOLA DATA

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

Welcome and thank you for coming to hear about Mercy Corps’ endeavor to better
manage our projects and improve M&E data for our field teams.

Today we are going to walk through a demo of an internally built, open source
software called Tola. Tola is a pashto word for “all” or “complete”, translating to all or
complete data. Tola was initially developed with our team in Afghanistan and our HQ
IT team. Given the success it had in Afghanistan and the demand from other country
teams, Mercy Corps recently made the decision to invest in Tola to roll it out globally.
We are currently in the process of rolling Tola out to an initial five countries -
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Lebanon and Timor Leste - and aim to move into a
global rollout by February with a better understanding of what it will take to scale
globally.
Slide 2

Tola Data
The problem...
● Duplicate, disaggregated and broken data
● No central, standard system for M&E
● Data is not timely enough for decision-making

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

Before we jump into the demo, let me talk about what led to the creation of Tola and the
problems our teams were facing in the field.
● Duplicate, disaggregated and broken data - requires lots of time intensive, manual
steps to do basic analysis
● No central, standard system for M&E - each program and team has to reinvent the
wheel
● Data is not timely enough for decision making - going back to point one, field teams
have a hard time just getting access to data and requires lots of time
● Plenty of solutions out there which makes it hard to centralize
Slide 3

What is Tola…
o Open Source
▪ Built on Django, Python, MongoDB (data), and MySQL (forms)
o Modular
▪ MC configuration described, but modular design allows for independent use
of apps

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

- Its open source with constant upgrades.

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

The goal of Tola is to support adaptive program management and enable experienced-
based learning by providing tools that can improve the quality of program M&E data.
● Tola is a platform that allows for:
○ Traceability - the evidence and data to support results
○ Accessibility - all team members have access to the data and information in
the system
○ Standardization - providing a common set of forms for project management
○ Timeliness of data - allowing teams to analyze new information from the field
quickly to make informed decisions based on data for improved programming
○ Connections to various datasets - allowing teams to manage their data all in
one place
○ Country-level portfolio analysis - giving teams the ability to track program
performance easily and more efficiently

Tola currently has three primary components that can be adapted for each country context
and need:
● Tola Tables – allows users to connect data collected in digital format (through tools
such as ODK/Ona, iFormBuilder, Excel, etc and not on paper) directly into progress
towards activity completion and indicator targets
● Tola Activity – consists of two of modules:
○ Workflow - is a set of standard forms that support project management
workflow, breaking a program (or grant) into smaller concrete projects to
manage and track all program activities and outputs including project-level
budget versus actuals
○ Indicator – allows teams to track all program indicators and their targets vs.
actuals
○ Tola Report – Data warehouse that allows you to generate custom reports and
visualize your data in Maps or Dashboards. That can be shared with donors.
It is NOT:
a replacement for M&E structures or staff
a detailed analysis tool (such as a statistical tool)
a tool for record retention (such as Google Drive, DropBox, etc)
program design tool or program logic (in it's current form)
A beneficiary Information Management system.
Slide 5

Security…
o All applications behind firewall
o Beneficiary data stored on internal servers
o Not encrypted, but users can anonymize or delete personal identifying
information from tables; should keep original dataset separate
o SSL for uploads and downloads; token based authentication
o User roles and MC staff credentials required

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

• Grant and Award Information Tracker (GAIT) serves for Program level information
• PM@MC provides framework for design (happens outside of Tola Activity)
• Design for Impact Guide (DIG) serves as standard library of indicators
Slide 7

Tola Data
Tola Tables
● Data Consolidation
○ [Link]
○ KoboToolBox
○ CommCare
○ iFormBuilder
○ Google Sheets/CSV/Excel
● Data Manipulation and Formatting
○ Merging data sets and columns
○ Cleaning data
● Continued...

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

Tola Tables is a data collection, aggregation and management tool for all
types of data collection methods designed to track the impact of NGO
programs and projects in the field. Designed initially to solve the problem of
duplicate, disaggregated or broken data from mobile data collection platforms
suchs as FormHub and iFormbuilder, it is now integrated with multiple data
collection platforms and provides merge, auto download, cleaning, editing,
sharing and analysis tools for all types of data. It also provides the data
service back end for other Tola tools such as Tola Activity.

Tola Tables directly integrates with mobile data collection providers such as
Ona to provide users with access to all of their forms and data for import and
management in Tola. Each data set is then managed in its own silo that can
then later be mapped and merged into any number of other data silos owned
or shared with the user.

Each silo in Tola Tables can be shared as a public repository with other users
or exported as a Google sheet, excel file, or through our external REST data
service API for integration with other data platforms or analysis tools.

Tola Tables also provides direct record editing and clean up within the tool as
well as a set of map and merge tools to allow the user to merge multiple data
silos together into one.
Slide 8

Tola Data
TOLA TABLES continued...
● Data Analysis
○ iPython (Jupyter) Notebook
● Visualization
○ Charts
○ Tables to sort and filter data
● API - pull/push data from/to other
systems
○ Google Spreadsheets and
Fusion Tables
○ Tola Activity ( Indicator Tracking
)

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

iPython also know as jupyter Notebook will be used as the analysis tool, we have started
integration with iPython Notebook , also supports data formats from R , SPSS , Julia , Ruby ,
JavaScript , C# , Perl , PHP , Java9
Slide 9

Tola Data

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

Tola Tables welcome page

Tola Data
TOLA TABLES

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

Basic table operation , with sharing modules.

Tola Data
TOLA TABLES

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

Merging Tables
Slide 12

Tola Data
TOLA TABLES

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

When changing assessments with an added question or two , this proves to be very handy.
Slide 13

Tola Data
TOLA TABLES continued...

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

It’s funny how we keep hearing people calling a count function data analysis.
It helps with Data Analysis , please note that this is a very technical tool , but at MC we thrive
to be geeky.
Slide 14

Tola Data

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

Maps on ( CartoDB )
Dashboard on Chart JS
Slide 15

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

Now, let’s actually take a look at the system starting with Tola Activity. Again, the purpose of
Tola Activity is to break a program (or grant) down into smaller activities/projects to track
and manage the status of a project through standard forms, workflow and process -
facilitating traceability of data through documentation of evidence. Each stage of a project is
tracked within program dashboards allowing managers to see progress at a glance and the
ability to drill down to get details or enter more information.

The home page dashboard consists of a list of all active programs in a country, a map
illustrating where we’re working, and two graphs showing indicator targets and the actual
results, and a project status chart. By filtering on one of the programs, the map and graphs
will update accordingly.

At the very bottom of the page you’ll see a list of all indicators used by the country or by the
selected program you’ve filtered.
MC is very oriented towards evidence based indicators, and a lot of thinking and testing is
done to select the best indicators suitable for the current program.
Slide 16

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

From the home page, you can drill down to the program dashboard - this dashboard
illustrates the status of smaller, discrete projects that make up a larger program (also referred
to as a grant). You can see how many projects are under each program and the status of
each.

Click to next image

From here, you can then drill down to a specific project dashboard. The project dashboard
shows you the status of the project agreement and completion which we will look at next.
Slide 17

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

Tola Help

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

• Encourages user feedback and crowd consensus on fix/enhancement roadmap

Tola Data

Thank you!
For more information, go to our splash page [Link],
GitHub/Tola or email tola@[Link]

Helping people survive and communities thrive.

Thank you

If you’d like to learn more about Tola, please go to our Github/spash page or contact
tola@[Link]