FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Cape Town, 11 October – TeamPact, a digital tool developed by Waves for Change, is revolutionising the way funders, foundations, and NGOs in various sectors, including Early Childhood Development (ECD), monitor and track attendance in their programmes. By capturing and providing real-time data on participant attendance, the TeamPact platform offers users a complete and efficient picture of their programmes’ impact.
TeamPact’s impact report, titled, An Innovative Tool for Monitoring and Tracking Impact: A Case for Early Learning Programmes in South Africa, showcases the journey of TeamPact, reach, and includes insights from users who have experienced the efficiency of the tool.
TeamPact has been used both within and outside the ECD sector. The traditional method of collecting, analysing, and sharing attendance data through paper-based registers is time-consuming and often results in difficulties in managing and ensuring the accuracy of programme participant data. For instance, in ECD, paper registers rely on practitioners carefully marking the attendance of children in early learning programmes, which leaves little opportunity for verifying attendance in case of mistakes or discrepancies.
TeamPact addresses this attendance-tracking issue by streamlining the process and enabling users to collect, collate, analyse, and share automatically audited attendance data with relevant stakeholders in real-time. Leveraging the selfie culture and artificial intelligence facial recognition technology, the user simply takes a picture of the group at the beginning and end of each session using the TeamPact app on their mobile phone. The pictures are then synced to a cloud database where they are automatically audited. Thereafter, the data is displayed on a dashboard that funders, administrators, and other stakeholders can access in real-time.
Accurate and verifiable data is crucial for early learning centres to sustain support as needed. Such data can also unlock opportunities for further funding to enhance learning programmes, infrastructure, and services. Knowing attendance numbers, programme participation, and duration is also valuable in identifying children who attend less frequently, enabling young learners to receive the required dosage of services to improve learning outcomes and well-being. With the management of a large number of children and limited resources, efficient data tracking is essential to streamline practitioners’ work.
In 2019, Innovation Edge invested R297,000 towards the development and piloting of the pre-release version of TeamPact in ECD. An additional R1.6 million was invested in 2019 to improve the TeamPact software, expand the customer base, and cover operational expenses. This investment also enabled the registration of TeamPact International to attract international clients. As a result, a client in London purchased a TeamPact license in 2022, allowing the social enterprise to generate revenue beyond South African borders. The intention is to grow the top-line revenue of TeamPact to enable free provision of the recently-developed “lite” version of the app for ECD organisations in low-income communities.
Outside ECD, TeamPact has been tested and proven to be effective in youth and social development, and social employment services. A few organisations have used TeamPact to track attendance of youth and staff participating in their programmes, for reporting, safeguarding, and resource allocation among other things.
“For Innovation Edge, investing in TeamPact was a response to the need in the ECD sector to verify that the resources we’re allocating to early learning programmes are making a tangible difference in the lives of South Africa’s youngest learners. We know that by showing the beneficiary reach and impact of a funder’s support, we can sustain long-term backing for ECD and other social sectors. Demand from other sectors confirms for us that purpose-driven organisations, and policy-makers, are looking to make better, more efficient decisions about how they measure impact and allocate resources ,” says Adliya van Niekerk, Investment Principal at Innovation Edge.
Download the report to learn more.
For queries, contact Dimpho Lephaila, [email protected].
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