Request for Proposals
Financial Modeling Tool June 2017
Initiative Background Summary The Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) originated to bring together the public and private sectors to realize an inclusive digital society that connects everyone to life-enhancing and life-enabling technology. DIAL’s role is to convene the community, discover what works and what doesn’t, generate insights to help strengthen ecosystem partners, and advocate best practice recommendations. DIAL is positioned to serve as a neutral broker, bringing together government, industry, and other development stakeholders to promote new solutions to old problems.
July 19, 2017
Financial Modeling Tool
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DIAL focuses its work in three areas: •
Platforms and Services (P&S): DIAL addresses reach and capacity challenges, working to help digital service providers design and deploy their services faster, at a lower cost, and to a wider audience in development markets.
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Data for Development (D4D): DIAL accelerates shared value scenarios in technology and economic models, working closely with MNOs and digital data holders. DIAL also supports discussions tackling sensitive privacy and security questions that hinder the public sector and development community’s access to and use of data to improve communications and services provided to the people they service.
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Insights and Impact (I&I): DIAL produces, curates, and disseminates evidence-based good practices packaged in easy to understand guidance so that governments, technology companies, the development community, and other implementers can quickly use it to deploy digital services to more people. DIAL also convenes these groups to shape greater collective impact.
DIAL’s Insight and Impact (I&I) focus area has four main initiatives: •
Stewardship for the Principles for Digital Development. DIAL invests in a series of comprehensive, complementary global public goods for the digital development community to increase awareness and adoption of the Principles for Digital Development and maximize their impact.
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Operational How-to Guidance. DIAL produces operational how-to guidance for digital development practitioners to improve implementation of digital deployments and digital development programs.
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Exploratory Research. DIAL undertakes independent research and support the efforts of other actors to elevate new insights emerging from the digital development ecosystem.
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Donor Collaboration. DIAL works closely with donor organizations to assess the gaps in funder investment and design approaches for better collaboration in digital development.
Scope of Work
Problem Statement DIAL observes a gap in knowledge among digital development practitioners on how to appropriately quantify and model the financial requirements of their digital development programs over time. This is based on discussions with digital development stakeholders as well as publicly available background
July 19, 2017
Financial Modeling Tool
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research which suggests the limited leveraging of financial modelling tools evaluating IT considerations in digital development programs. The ability to identify, forecast, build and/or better leverage financial models that consider the unique aspects of technology deployments is uneven across digital development practitioners, who have strategic responsibility for enhancing efficiencies and ensuring the sustainability of in-country digital development programs. These practitioners may be based in government, an international/national NGO, or private sector company. Considerations of outcomes and choices related to total cost of ownership (TCO), market sizing, business modelling and value chain analysis are also imperfectly applied, or not applied at all.
Project Description DIAL
