Akvo

Business type

Crowdsource

Service/product description

Akvo creates and shares internet and mobile phone tools that for the first time make it easy for everyone to reach out and fund thousands of new water and sanitation projects, in some of the poorest parts of the world. This is really important, because today 2.6 billion people lack sanitation facilities and 1.1 billion still can’t access safe drinking water. Fix this, and people climb out of poverty fast. It is one of the first organisations to raise substantial funding (over €2m by end of 2009) to build open source software and services for international development and poverty reduction. Its systems have the potential to underpin a new generation of NGOs and campaigning partners, who want to make development aid spending more transparent. Using Akvo, funders choose the projects they want, and implementation teams share project progress online directly from the field, via SMS, photos and movie clips. Better feedback means happy donors, and dialogue between field workers builds skills and improves quality. Time and money are saved while people across the world get safe drinking water and proper sanitation. By the end of 2009, Akvo featured more than 130 partners with around 100 projects that would provide water or sanitation to almost 400,000 people. In October, it was announced that Live Earth, the largest ever global awareness initiative related to water, would use Akvo as its global technology platform to support fundraising and make project progress visible online. Over the next few years, Akvo aims to attract at least €60 million to water and sanitation projects through its system, enabling approximately 6,000 small projects.

What does 'openness' mean in this case?

Akvo focuses on solving three problems through openness: – Open knowledge sharing. It runs www.akvopedia.org, an information portal designed to act as a “wikipedia for water”, which is open and free for all to use. – Find projects to fund, or find donors to fund your project. www.akvo.org is an online marketplace designed to scale to feature very large numbers of small-scale water and sanitation projects online, visible to all. – Share project progress online. Akvo partners use Akvo RSR (Really Simple Reporting) to share project updates openly online, via web or SMS. Akvo offers its core services to NGO and funding partners though a low cost software-as-a-service (SaaS) fee structure. This allows international development organisations to adopt Akvo progressively, at low cost, maximising the efficiencies possible through a web-based service. Akvo.org is built on open source components, and releases its Akvo RSR and Akvo Marketplace systems under the GNU AGPL license. Akvo shares the vast majority of its marketing output under Creative Commons licenses. The team has also pioneered Discoverable Communications techniques, to make the organisation’s activities as open and accessible as possible. Almost all staff use Twitter for both internal and external communications, and other communication activities use creative commons photography and video shared via tools such as Flickr, Blip.tv (for akvo.tv) and via a WordPress blog.