Case Study - Requirements and vendor evaluation for an M&E system across five country offices

Client

Habitat for Humanity International (HFHI) has supported over 22 million people in more than 70 countries since 1976, tackling housing challenges and homelessness worldwide. Their programs rely on strong Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning (MEAL) practices to stay accountable to communities and donors alike.

Opportunity

HFHI's EMEA region needed a Management Information System (MIS) that could handle the full scope of their MEAL work. Their existing processes were fragmented across country offices in Ethiopia, Malawi, Zambia, Côte d'Ivoire, and Uganda, each with different tools, workflows, and reporting standards. Without a unified system, teams spent time reconciling data rather than learning from it.

They needed to understand what a future system should actually do based on how staff worked in practice, then identify which solution on the market could deliver it without locking the organization into something costly or inflexible.

Approach

We ran the engagement in two phases, working iteratively throughout: we shared findings with HFHI in regular review cycles so the requirements and evaluation criteria were validated as they took shape rather than at the end.

Phase 1 focused on how people actually work with data. We interviewed 25 staff across five country offices and reviewed 30 existing documents to map how data was collected, stored, and used for reporting. That surfaced good practices worth keeping and gaps where manual workarounds had taken over. We benchmarked against peer organizations to ground our recommendations in what works across the sector, then translated everything into a set of functional requirements for the future MIS. (For more on how we think about this, see our guides to designing the right M&E system and building M&E frameworks.)

Phase 2 turned those requirements into a market evaluation. We assessed 24 vendors against 37 scoring criteria covering functionality, cost, scalability, and ease of adoption. Shortlisted tools went through hands-on configuration testing with HFHI staff to check that what looked good on paper held up in practice. We developed total cost of ownership projections for three scenarios (single application, multiple integrated tools, and a hybrid platform) so HFHI could weigh trade-offs with full visibility. We took a similar multi-stakeholder requirements approach in our work tracking land restoration across the Sahel for the UNCCD, where aligning monitoring indicators across countries and funders posed the same coordination challenge.

Outcomes

The engagement gave HFHI what they needed to move forward with clarity:

• A user requirements report grounded in real workflows across five country offices
• A scored vendor comparison with total cost of ownership for each pathway
• Three system architecture scenarios with trade-off analysis to support their strategic decision

With these in hand, HFHI could select their MIS based on evidence rather than assumptions.

Technologies used

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At Hikaya, we help NGOs and nonprofits worldwide figure out what their teams need from a system before committing to a platform, grounding requirements in real workflows rather than feature wishlists.

If you're weighing MIS options or trying to turn scattered M&E practices into a clear set of requirements, start a conversation with us, or see how we approach discovery and design.