Waliku: A Technical Team and Product Suite for student education and well-being management

Since 2021, Waliku is both a Save the Children technical team and a set of tools for student education and wellbeing management. Any Save the Children or development partner project can utilize the Waliku team’s products and services to meet their data requirements for better project and school-level decision making. 

Waliku’s journey commenced as an innovative idea by Save the Children in 2017, followed by a proof-of-concept study and pilot project in West Sumba, Indonesia during 2018-2020. During this period, the Waliku team learned many lessons that helped define its product and service offering. 

First that digital technology should be immediately relevant to the end user and should simplify their work. Waliku designed its user interface for the needs of the Indonesian teachers and administrators, and reduced their workload with attendance reports by using their formats and automating the process. As a result, daily usage of Waliku was 81% across 21 pilot schools in its second year.  

Second, that data from the digital tool should provide insights that inspires users to consistently use the solution. Waliku provides school administrators and teachers with immediate information on chronic and severe chronic absentees, which they can use for their follow up with individual students at risk of dropout.  

Third, that tools that can be used as modules better meet the specific needs of school-communities. As a result, our solutions now differentiate to include Waliku Class (student absence management), Waliku Admin (school administration), Waliku Assess (school clinic assessments), Waliku Clinic (community clinics) and Waliku Dashboard (district and project monitoring).  

Lastly, that preferred tools and technology and customizations should be considered when scoping the needs of school-communities. As a result, the Waliku team has started to add many configurable features in its tools. The application is now multi-lingual, and simpler technology such as automated phone calls and SMS, and Excel can be used with Waliku to capture student data. Also, we do not limit our support to Waliku products alone. We provide implementation guidance to projects that may choose to use other digital products. Two examples of this include our support to Open EMIS pilots in Lebanon and Colombia.