We facilitate CSOs and private sector partners in design and implementation of sustainability strategies. In collaboration with Instellar, Saraswati developed a Business Planning for Social Impact curriculum. This curriculum introduces the Social Lean Canvas as a tool for organizations to self-assess the feasibility of their business ideas. Following the assessment process, we encourage organizations to validate their business ideas by conducting market testing. Our support already provided to CSOs in Jakarta and elsewhere in Indonesia is complemented by pitching training and mentoring opportunities for select CSOs with strong business ideas and clear plans to realize their goals.

Together with The Asia Foundation Myanmar, we explored the challenges of whether, how best and when to scale Data for Development initiatives. This included collaboration with UN Pulse Lab Jakarta and Instellar to conduct workshops for two Myanmar organizations, Thibi and the Renaissance Institute, to trial a series of guiding questions as well as Miro-based tools to explore these.

We build development partners’ data skills. In August 2018, Saraswati launched datakali, a comprehensive data for development initiative in collaboration with Data Science Indonesia and Iykra. Under the datakali initiative, we offer comprehensive trainings and workshops, facilitate data networking and research dives, as well as design tailored technical assistance. Our training has supported CSOs in strategic planning and data-driven decisionmaking.

“The datakali training allowed us to better structure our databases, which improved our decision-making. We can offer more effective interventions as we gain better insights on assisted groups”
BITRA

We promote data-driven initiatives. We collaborated with The Conversation Indonesia to develop a pitching and writing training for development partners in order to promote more effective data-driven writing to support their policy advocacy. For partners who are more interested in data analysis, Saraswati has teamed with Katadata in developing data-based writing training that allows partners to learn data collection, aggregation, and visualization methods, in support of strategic program design, policy advocacy, and media publication.

During and following the COVID-19 pandemic we supported the pivoting of many local CSOs by providing digital learning capacity support in collaboration with Penabulu Foundation's Lingkar Madani initiative.