How DevResults is driving impact in humanitarian programs with Microsoft Azure

Rebuilding foreign assistance around data: How DevResults is shaping what comes next

In a rural district of Uganda, a vaccination campaign unfolds with utmost care. As the program progresses, health workers rely on DevResults’s highly advanced and flexible monitoring and evaluation software for international development. Using the platform, they access vital real-time data, where they can see which villages are being reached and which are being missed. Field teams collect info on digital devices such as mobile phones, even in locations with little to no connectivity, syncing figures to the central system when coverage returns so every community is accounted for. This kind of capability lets teams take action instantly by adjusting outreach mechanics, shifting critical resources, and ensuring no community is unaccounted for. 

In another part of the world, an agricultural program uses DevResults to support smallholder farmers. The platform helps teams identify which training approaches actually change farmer behavior. Every training session and field visit is tracked to understand what is working, which farmers then adopt new techniques, and which practices boost success. With this real-time insight, program managers are able to focus on effective approaches and recalibrate those that fall short. Over time, these data-driven adjustments strengthen food security, economic stability, and resilience, benefiting entire communities.

Thanks to advanced digital systems on monitoring and evaluation, insights on vital data translate into tangible, measurable improvements for the communities being served. In both cases, field teams collected information on mobile devices—even in areas with little to no connectivity—syncing it back to a central system once coverage returned, ensuring every community was accounted for and that support landed where it mattered most. It was not the technology per se that singlehandedly drove that change, but the ability to see, study, and steer action based on timely information.

To help organizations stay effective and maintain their important work helping local communities, DevResults has taken several steps: Operationally, the team meets clients where they are; often the same organizations, though operating at a fraction of their former scale; and technically, the company continues to refine the platform, improving features, integrating emerging technologies, and safeguarding client data from malicious actors.

Nowadays, DevResults is built on Microsoft Azure as a Platform-as-a-Service, leveraging the cloud’s robust infrastructure to ensure reliability, security, and scalability. With Azure, DevResults is able to focus on the important matter at hand, which is building features that directly serve humanitarian and development organizations. Its ability to scale seamlessly and maintain consistent access makes it way easier for teams in remote or low-resource environments to track and analyze this critical data. And as the only purpose-built monitoring and evaluation platform with FedRAMP authorization, DevResults emphasizes how security and privacy is a priority, and that guaranteeing that data remains confidential, accurate, and available across all users and operating environments is of great importance.

Turning data into a living actionable system

DevResults makes it clear: the company primarily works with the organizations implementing programs rather than with communities directly. But its impact is imperative throughout, helping their partner organizations be more receptive, efficient, and effective in their humanitarian missions all over the globe. The company exists to make adaptability and accountability achievable in execution, and its core is purpose-built for international development and humanitarian work.

Based in Washington, D.C., DevResults was founded in 2009 by Herb Caudill, a graphic designer and programmer, who had spent nearly a decade building websites and software for international development organizations. Through years of close, on-the-ground experience, Caudill began to notice a pattern. Time and time again, organizations were being asked to measure complex outcomes, report impact, and justify results, but the tools they relied on were never designed for the realities that the work entailed at that time. As Caudill puts it, “DevResults was inspired by a recurring, structural problem I kept seeing across the international development sector, where organizations were being asked to measure and explain complex results, but they lacked software designed for that purpose.” What started as a problem became a solution. Caudill believed this was a problem the sector shouldn’t have to solve over and over again.

Before, organizations were left with three imperfect options: build a system from scratch, bend a CRM or ERP far beyond its limits, or rely on endless spreadsheets and manual work. By creating reusable, configurable software that worked from day one and is polished, purpose-built, and adaptable to different contexts, Caudill enabled organizations to focus on the work that matters, rather than spending countless hours maintaining fragile, homegrown systems.

Beyond his technical expertise, Caudill’s motivation was deeply personal. He grew up in Latin America, where his father worked with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), helping build rural water systems in underserved communities. At one point, his father taught himself dBase III to create a simple database just to track how many people had gained access to clean drinking water, in which villages, and where in the country.

“He was proud of that work,” Caudill recalls, “but it was a shame that part of his time had to go into learning how to write software because the right tools didn’t exist.” That memory stayed with him.

DevResults emerged as a response to that mismatch, and a long-term commitment to building the tools focused on making real-world impact, and to making accountability in foreign assistance possible without distracting or taking people away from the mission. Today, the platform serves more than 40 organizations across over 160 countries, including non-profits, governments, and private-sector partners.

Before and after: What changes when data works

Like any tech product, DevResults experienced a lot of changes and evolutions. In its early days, it was designed to replace fragmented internal processes and scattered databases with a single, unified system. But as the needs of organizations grew more complex, Caudill and his team quickly realized that effective monitoring and reporting couldn’t live in isolation. Internal systems needed to interact with the wider data ecosystem.

In response, DevResults expanded its capabilities by adding a suite of analytic and data integrations. These included a Power BI connector, mobile data collection tools such as SurveyCTO and KoboToolbox, and onboarding features that generate files compatible with open data standards, most notably those required by the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). Together, these integrations allowed organizations to move data smoothly upstream and downstream, turning info into something that could easily be shared, analyzed, and acted on.

“These links deal primarily with upstream and downstream data flows; for the core monitoring and evaluation features, we’ve fine-tuned the options available to configure the complex,” further explains Aasit Nanavati, Chief Strategy Officer at DevResults.

The “before” picture is strikingly familiar across organizations. Program staff spend days—or sometimes weeks—manually consolidating spreadsheets from different offices. Indicator data can’t be meaningfully compared because teams define metrics differently. Reports arrive long after decisions have already been made. 

Meanwhile, the “after” looks radically different. Data flows into a single system with consistent definitions. Program managers pull up dashboards that show progress and performance in minutes, not months. Leadership teams can see what’s working and what isn’t, while there’s still time to respond. This shift from reactive reporting to proactive management forces impact. Resources go to what works, problems are caught early, and staff spend less time on data and more time on meaningful program work.

Accountability is built into the system. DevResults offers approval workflows with full audit trails, built-in data quality checks, and reporting tools that meet stringent government compliance requirements right out of the box. But technology alone can’t fix broken data practices. That’s why DevResults pairs its software with deep implementation expertise, helping organizations manage change, design practical data architectures, and build the internal capacity to use evidence effectively for both learning and reporting.

In today’s humanitarian and development landscape, all this capability is not optional, but a necessity; it became the foundation upon which monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems by DevResults pivoted and progressed, navigating programs and accountability toward growth.

Major milestones and technological shifts over the years

Nanavati also highlights several major technological shifts that have shaped DevResults’ evolution since its inception, and they are all guided by a single principle: “empowering users to manage, trust, and act on their own data.” Among these are the launch of core platform capabilities such as MultiMatrix, an advanced data query and analysis tool, as well as a self-service site configuration portal that reduces reliance on technical administrators; and expanded relational data models that better reflect the complexity of real-world programs. “Together, these upgrades democratize access to high-quality data while maintaining rigorous security and privacy controls,” Nanavati confirms.

According to DevResults, these tools and foundations have, most importantly, positioned the platform to be future-ready by design. As Nanavati points out: “By standardizing, structuring, and governing data across the full value chain, the platform now enables the responsible use of AI for tasks such as advanced analytics, anomaly detection, data quality assurance, and decision support—bringing meaningful insights to users from frontline implementers to senior leadership. AI at DevResults is not an add-on, but a natural extension of a platform built for trusted, decision-ready data.”

A look into an AI future

DevResults works on a broad range of organizations, from international narcotics and law enforcement programming to climate resilience and environmental stability projects. Across these diverse contexts, the platform delivers decision-ready data that strengthens accountability, enables rapid course correction, and improves coordination, helping organizations remain operational and responsive amid profound uncertainty. And for the company, the suspension opened a critical question: what should the future of foreign assistance look like now that USAID is closed? As a platform purpose-built for international development and humanitarian work, the answer for DevResults is clear. The system must be rebuilt around trusted, decision-ready data, allowing organizations to act, adapt, and remain accountable when conditions shift.

DevResults is committed to expanding its AI capabilities within its platform to focus on problem solving. As Nanavati explains: “We envision DevResults’ expansion along four interconnected dimensions: technology, platform capabilities, partnerships, and global reach. From a technology perspective, we are deepening the platform’s role as core data infrastructure for development and foreign assistance, prioritizing interoperable, secure, and AI-ready systems that can adapt as global policy and programming models evolve. This is especially critical as governments and their partners around the world reassess how development assistance is structured and delivered.”

At the platform level, the goal is to learn from the past while preparing for the future. Looking ahead, the company is committed to delivering a proven, configurable platform that embeds data as a core operating principle, not an afterthought, enabling faster learning, stronger oversight, and better responses. Nanavati adds: “Through partnerships, we aim to work closely with government agencies, implementing partners, and multilateral institutions to establish shared data standards and scalable digital infrastructure that strengthens accountability while reducing duplication.”

A platform that enables efficiency and accountability for results is the single most important tool an organization can invest in given the current political environment, not just in the US, but around the world. Ultimately, DevResults’ global expansion is guided by a simple mission: to help rebuild the foreign assistance model around reliable, real-time data, delivering measurable, transparent outcomes for the people who need it most, which is the heart of what humanitarian work is all about.

Discover more about DevResults on LinkedIn.