ENABLING SPECIALISTS

Like our partners, we share a joint ambition to
unlock and accelerate impact, scale and
sustainability of development.
Working closely with partners, we invest with a rare mix of resources, deep expertise and on-ground experience, shaping social equity, working across SDG goals.

PIE

This is a digital, societal platform that provides scale and integration to farmers and artisans. It serves the farmer and other stakeholders who play a vital role in the farmer’s livelihood. Such stakeholders are invited to this platform with an intent of exploring new opportunities, expanding business scope, exchanging data and even plugging into each other’s systems through interoperability.

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DR. ANGELA CHAUDHURI

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DR. ANGELA CHAUDHURI

TechTonic

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TechTonic
TechTonic envisions technology as a force multiplier, problem solver, paradigm changer, and significant enabler of social impact. As a unit, our prime intention is to design, implement, or apply technology solutions in a way that works for all, especially the people from marginalised communities. Our expertise stems from our significant on-field experience, a multi-disciplinary team, and partnerships. TechTonic is product and company-agnostic, which allows it to seamlessly integrate with whatever is effective and functional.
TechTonic operates as the dedicated technology strategy division. The pivotal function fulfilled by TechTonic revolves around the creation and development of:
Technology architectures
Implementation strategies for impact programmes at scale

Our Approach

TechTonic uses a Business Process Improvement approach to increase the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the programme through the use of technology. Moving ahead, TechTonic will adopt a course of action focused on the following approaches:
TechTonic aims to work with partners to strengthen platforms that help improve the discovery of technology solutions within the sector. It ensures that all organisations have the resources and support they need to adopt solutions that improve the scale, impact, and sustainability of their respective programmes.
TechTonic intends to work with a network of partners to bridge the digital divide on the ground and ensure that critical digitally delivered services reach the vulnerable population.

Our Functions

To implement its strategies and blueprints, TechTonic works with a range of partners with tech development capabilities.
Internally, TechTonic also plays the role of a testing lab that assesses the capabilities of various solutions for the sector.

Our Work

TechTonic has worked on a diverse set of projects and programmes and has used technology as a lever to enable smooth operations and capture impact effectively.

Community Action Collab (previously #COVIDActionCollab)

Community Action Collab (CAC) is a spring-to-action humanitarian emergency platform that builds the resilience of Vulnerable People (VP) and their institutions. Started as #COVIDActionCollab, the group has successfully been able to demonstrate its capabilities by reaching 25 million services and 15 million VPs as part of the COVID response.
The TechTonic team worked with the technology partners of the collaborative to create a strong operational backbone that facilitated the provision as well as monitoring of the above-mentioned 25 million services. Most of the implementation operations were operationalised through an in-house-developed application called DICEflow, through which we were able to map out the number of services delivered to each person all across the country.

Social Protection

The Social Protection Programme is a Catalyst Group initiative that has been ongoing since 2019. It ensures that central and state government benefits reach eligible beneficiaries at the community level. The benefits are delivered through a help desk-facilitated model led by field-level workers.
TechTonic has helped create a model for operationalising the facilitation of social protection benefits to vulnerable populations on its in-house application, DICEflow. The solution designed for the social protection team involves streamlined workflows to ensure an up-to-date database of government schemes, assess eligibility for community members, verify document availability, and facilitate the scheme availing process. The solution allows geo-location tracking of where each community member is in their scheme application process. It also helps understand and generate insights into why certain community members were unable to avail themselves of a certain scheme.

Manyata: A Digitally Enabled Quality Improvement and Accreditation Journey for Small and Medium-Sized Private Nursing Homes

Manyata is a programme led by the Federation of Obstetric and Gynaecological Societies of India (FOGSI) and a global initiative for improving maternal health standards by a globally recognised pharmaceutical company. This programme spans 22 states, has been ongoing since 2013, and is now in its fourth phase.
For Manyata, TechTonic has been involved in creating the technology strategy and architecture of the project. The programme has envisioned a technology stack that allows various technology solutions to work together towards ensuring seamless delivery of the programme on the ground and an efficient data flow mechanism that enables strong governance.
We followed the below process towards making this happen:
Conduct a business process mapping and technology assessment of the entire Manyata system towards building an understanding of what is working, what is not working, and what it will take to make things work.
Create the technology architecture that would help the programme sustain itself at scale.
Create the technology strategy for taking the new Manyata technology stack to at least 1,000 Small and Medium-Sized private nursing homes.
Partner with various technology organisations to ensure that the intended design of the technology stack gets deployed. The Ecosystem partners involved in the project have been Dhwani Rural Information Systems, PharmAccess Foundation, Maternity Foundation, Aastrika, Together For Her (Avegen), and Nivi Inc.
Ensuring long-term sustainability by creating a modular architecture reduces the dependency on one system. It ensures that the strengths and reach of various partners working in the ecosystem are leveraged rather than sabotaged.

DICEflow

In 2018, we conceptualised and developed an Outreach-as-a-solution (OaaS) called DICEflow, a mobile and web solution that enables continuous and deeper community engagement. DICEflow has been instrumental in delivering key wellness and social protection-based benefits to the poor in Swasti’s Invest4Wellness (i4we) programme. Currently, DICEflow is also being used to facilitate vaccine eligibility and registration, screening of non-communicable diseases, and access to social protection schemes under the Community Action Collab initiative.

Please reach out to us at

[email protected]

Education

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Education

Our education portfolio is diverse, covering the right to education, education for livelihoods, education governance, ICT (Information, Communication, Technology) and innovations in education. We have worked across the entire cycle of learning, from early child-care, school education, supplementary and vocational training, life-skills education and workplace advancement.

We have conducted impact evaluations to provide evidence for decision-making on scale and for investment in education initiatives such as the Prajayatna and Nali Kali government projects in Karnataka, and Pratham-Vodafone’s ICT initiatives in urban and rural sites across their programme locations in India.

We anchored and supported the implementation of the Centre for Education (CEI) and Results for Development (R4D) in India. We have also evaluated several early childhood programmes. Through projects for Agastya and Pratham Books, we have assessed the curiosity of students for science and their association with story books.

Behaviour Science

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Behaviour Science

Our Behavioural Sciences services help clients build scientifically-informed programmes, with a commitment to influencing and sustaining lasting behaviour change.

Catalyst Behavioural Sciences services specialise in:

  • Empirical-evidence-based strategies that initiate the adoption of new/positive behaviour

  • Technical support – guided by deep analysis and involving research, insights and trends – to support the ground-level implementation

  • Innovative tools and skills to help communities drive transformation

Some of the key services include:

  • Assessments – Community immersion workshops, Audience segmentation & insights, Understanding of the ecosystem

  • Package design and implementation support – for gateway behaviour change, tools, processes and capacity building

Some of the tools we use:

  • Predictive Behaviour Tools, like survival analysis

  • Game-based data collection tool

  • Audience insights and segmentation tool

  • Behaviour insights survey

Some key examples of our work in this area:

  • Social Norms hub – In partnership with UNICEF, CMS runs/manages the Social Norms hub as the secretariat, which promotes Social and Behavioural Change Communication and social norms work through six key Indian Universities

  • Changing behaviours and saving lives & money – Avahan Programme: applied behavioural sciences in 130,000 cohorts, achieving extraordinary results.

  • How financial goal setting affects health behaviour (and risk perception) – a study in partnership with Houston University, USA

  • Nutrition: Comprehensive programmatic assessment of intervention to improve dietary diversity – studies across states and value chains to assess, enhance and improve the programme’s impact in partnership with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN)

Gender & Equity

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Gender & Equity

Gender has been the cross-cutting theme of many of our research, review and evaluation studies in the areas of poverty, financial inclusion, social protection, livelihoods and governance.

We have adopted various gender frameworks, such as the World Bank’s agency opportunity framework and the women’s empowerment in agriculture index of IFPRI.

We contributed to developing an innovative reporting module on a mobile application that helps track the escalating experience of gender-based violence (GBV), focusing on the prevention and mitigation of violence.

We also quality assured the DOT tool developed for use in factories, where the workforce is often not literate. The DOT tool utilises a survey, using dots to capture responses about the work environment, where the colours of the dots indicate the level of action required to prevent GBV.

Social Protection

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Social Protection

An approach which has delivered over Rs 1500 crores & counting..

Social protection is a set of public measures that society provides for its members to protect them against economic and social distress caused by the absence or substantial reduction of income from work as a result of various contingencies ; the provision of health care; and the provision of benefits for families with children1.

Social protection reduces vulnerability, reduces inequity and gives a leg up to the poorest and most vulnerable.

At CMS, through the Universal Help Desk (UHD) for social protection we solve problems at every stakeholder level.

A UHD centre:

  • Bridges the gap between demand and supply of services

  • Increases awareness about schemes and programmes

  • Serves as a hub for referral linkages with other public and private service providers

  • Uses a technology platform to track applications and analyse data

Set up within a community organisation, NGO, a factory or any other location, UHD centres are local entities that are able to provide highly personalised and effective support to communities. The UHD centre is manned by a Help Desk Facilitator (HDF), a local, trained person. Various activities are conducted (depending on the community) to raise awareness and mobilise demand for UHD services. The centre adds value to the government by aggregating applications from communities and by helping the government achieve targets, gain recognition and relay modifications to social protection schemes to vulnerable communities.

By addressing the three main challenges to social protection – awareness, availability and ability – for both citizens and governments, the UHD initiative helps build bridges with communities and their leaders, while leveraging technology and relationships to solve pressing economic challenges.

What is our progress and success?

The Catalyst group has 27 years of social development experience. Swasti has worked and implemented several social protection projects with groups like sex workers, people living with HIV, factory workers and rural/urban women in various parts of the country. The journey began with UNDP, India-funded HIV-sensitive social protection model development and later on the Utkarsh Project and as part of the Avahan Project So far, we have facilitated a total of 177 UHDs covering 13 states & 1 UT, over a span of 10 years. We have mapped 2179 state schemes and central schemes, covering information on eligibility, scheme briefs, application details, and point person of contact. The economic benefits of our social protection initiatives amount to Rs. 276.21 crores in lives insured, Rs. 507.19 crores in benefits of schemes availed, and Rs. 1143.66 crores in the application of schemes.

Image: Women & TG in Tamil Nadu, India receiving social protection

Reach out to us to know more

1 (ILO Definition: ILO: World Labour Report: Income security and social protection in a changing world (Geneva, 2000) p. 29; ILO: Principles of Social Security (Geneva, 1998) p. 8)

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Catalyst Management Services Pvt. Ltd.,
#25, 4th Floor, AECS Layout,
RMV 2nd Stage, Ashwathnagar,
Bangalore – 560 094.
 

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About Us

Domain Areas

Transforming Investment

Our Initiatives

Enabling Specialists