act4dev was not born in an incubator. It was born in project offices, storage warehouses, training rooms and rural tracks of Madagascar. Every solution on this portal answers a problem we experienced ourselves, alongside field teams.
Built by practitioners
For years we built applications for our own needs: managing multi-donor budgets, tracking stock across fifty sites, mapping interventions, assessing interns, organising national contests. Each time, the same finding: imported tools are too expensive, too heavy, too disconnected from the field. So we built our own. Today we share these proven solutions with organisations doing the same work as us.
Why digitalisation has become unavoidable
Accountability first
Donors demand traceable, auditable, exportable data. An Excel file circulating by e-mail no longer meets that standard. An application with an audit log does.
Institutional memory
Project staff rotate, consultants leave. Without a system, every departure erases years of knowledge. Structured data remains.
The real cost of paper
Double entry, hunting for files, redoing calculations: paper and scattered files cost weeks of work per year. Digitalisation pays for itself.
Mobile is already here
Smartphones and SMS already cover rural areas. Not building on them means wasting an infrastructure your beneficiaries already carry in their pockets.
AI changes the equation
Drafting, translation, analysis: AI makes capabilities once reserved for large organisations accessible. Our role is to share these benefits with the development world.