How NGOs in Africa are using Salesforce.

Eight organisations, from a savings project in Marsabit to a toilet business in Tamale, on what changed when they moved their records off paper and spreadsheets.

When the BOMA Project began working with women in the drylands of northern Kenya, its mentors recorded their visits on paper. The forms went back to an office to be typed up and analysed. "Before Salesforce, it took up to three months for data entry and analysis," said Monica Kundu, BOMA's IT manager. By the time staff saw that a participant's business was in trouble, 90 days could have passed.

Since 2013, BOMA's mentors have used tablets. Their data goes into a Salesforce database, and when a business or savings group falls below targets BOMA has set, the system sends a text message and an email to the mentor and to the field officer who supervises them.

BOMA is one of a number of NGOs in Africa that have moved their programme, donor and finance records onto Salesforce, a customer relationship management platform originally built for sales teams. This article looks at eight of them, what they were doing before, and what changed afterwards.

Before: paper, spreadsheets and separate systems

The organisations in this article describe similar problems before they switched. Field data collected on paper took weeks or months to become usable. Village Enterprise, which supports women entrepreneurs in East Africa, heard from its own field staff that monitoring results took too long to reach them, and that the reports contained so much information it was hard to tell which businesses were doing well.

Keeping information in several places caused other problems. CAMFED, which pays for girls' secondary education in five African countries, ran its finances on an accounting package hosted at its UK headquarters. Staff in Africa could reach it only through remote desktop connections, and around half of CAMFED's internal IT support requests came from finance staff who could not log in or run reports. Finance figures were reconciled against programme data, audited, and then often reconciled again. When a prospective donor asked how many students CAMFED had supported that year, the answer could take a week.

Donors also wanted more detail. CAMFED's larger funders, including the UK's Department for International Development and MasterCard, asked to see the names of the students they had paid for, not only the total.

What Salesforce is

Salesforce is a cloud database for recording people and every interaction an organisation has with them. Companies use it to manage customers. NGOs set it up to hold records of beneficiaries, donors, volunteers, grants and programme results. Under its Power of Us programme, Salesforce gives eligible nonprofits 10 licences free of charge and discounts additional ones.

Most of the African NGOs in this article use Salesforce alongside an offline mobile app. TaroWorks, which the Grameen Foundation developed in 2013, lets field staff fill in forms on Android phones and tablets where there is no mobile signal. The data uploads to Salesforce once the device reconnects. A field worker records a visit offline; when the phone is back in range it syncs to Salesforce, where one record per person feeds dashboards for field officers, SMS and email alerts, and reports for donors.

BOMA Project, Kenya

BOMA runs a two-year programme for women living in extreme poverty in Kenya's drylands. Participants start small businesses in groups and join savings groups, and BOMA measures whether they have "graduated" from extreme poverty at the end. In 2014, BOMA had 26 mentors working across a region about the size of Ireland.

With the TaroWorks and Salesforce system, field officers can see from a dashboard which businesses have low values and which participants have missed their monthly savings contributions. Sabdio Doti, a BOMA field officer, said he could pull these reports at his desk and ask mentors to follow up the same day. Mentors also record their GPS location at each visit, so supervisors can confirm that visits happen.

BOMA later used the same system for staff timesheets, which some of its donors required each month. Mentors can enter their hours offline. When BOMA's assistant system administrator, Bill Owiti, analysed the timesheets, he found that field staff tended to take leave on Thursdays and Fridays, and managers used this to plan staffing.

Village Enterprise, East Africa

Before adopting Salesforce, Village Enterprise collected data in several different ways and wanted a single system where records could be linked and analysed. After field staff complained about slow, hard-to-read monitoring reports, the organisation created a simple classification of business health and set up dashboards that return results to field teams as soon as the data arrives.

Village Enterprise now uses TaroWorks and Salesforce to register business groups, process their applications for start-up funding and monitor how the businesses perform. Mentors record photographs, digital signatures and GPS coordinates for the people who attend each mentoring session, which the organisation uses as a quality check.

CAMFED, across five countries

CAMFED keeps everything about each student on one Salesforce record, and the record stays open after she leaves school and joins CAMA, CAMFED's alumnae network, which had 55,358 members in 2016.

In 2016, CAMFED also moved its finances onto FinancialForce, an accounting system that runs on Salesforce. Dan Probert, then head of IT innovation, said a cost comparison showed significant savings. He also said the finance team became involved with beneficiaries from the start of their time with CAMFED, rather than only when figures were reconciled at the end.

Horn of Africa Development Initiative (HODI), Marsabit, Kenya

HODI was founded in Marsabit in 2003 to provide legal services to poor residents and registered as an NGO in 2007. In 2016, it worked with the consultancy Vera Solutions to set up a monitoring and evaluation system on Salesforce for a women's savings group project.

In 2019, HODI extended the system with Amp Impact, Vera's programme management tool built on Salesforce, to cover all its projects. Staff now use it to allocate each donor's money to projects, manage logframes, record targets and results, and track budgets and spending. HODI also moved procurement and payments online and adjusts its reports to each funder's requirements. A HODI staff member, identified as Noor, said the system allowed the organisation to keep producing quarterly and annual reports during COVID-19. With around 25 staff in 2017, HODI is the smallest organisation in this article.

iDE Ghana and Sama Sama, northern Ghana

According to Ghana's 2014 household survey, 9.6 per cent of rural households had improved toilet facilities and 34.4 per cent had none. In 2016, iDE Ghana set up Sama Sama, a business based in Tamale that sells pour-flush toilets in the three northern regions. Sales agents sell door to door, trained local builders install the toilets, and households can pay in monthly instalments through mobile money.

During a pilot from October 2016 to January 2017, iDE built a Salesforce system linking sales agents' phones to the sales manager in Tamale and to iDE's support staff abroad. iDE had used a similar setup for its sanitation programme in Cambodia. According to iDE, the Ghana system has since tracked sales of more than 8,600 toilets and recorded demographic data that Sama Sama has used to check whether poorer households are getting access.

Grameen Foundation, Uganda

In 2009, the Grameen Foundation expanded its Community Knowledge Worker programme in Uganda with a 4.7 million US dollar grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The programme trained farmers chosen by their communities to give neighbours agricultural advice, weather forecasts and market prices using smartphones connected to Salesforce.

The database also recorded the questions farmers asked. Grameen noted that questions about livestock diseases could give the authorities early warning of an outbreak. A farmer in Bushenyi district said he had used the price information to check an offer from a middleman.

WaterAid and Catholic Relief Services

Both organisations run programmes in Ghana among many other countries. WaterAid UK and WaterAid Australia launched a shared system on Salesforce and Amp Impact that moved more than 600 staff from two older systems and a large number of spreadsheets into one platform for contracts and projects. Catholic Relief Services uses a Salesforce project management system with Amp Impact to report on more than 600 projects in over 70 countries against 25 standard indicators. Neither organisation has published details about its Ghana office specifically.

Similarities between the organisations

Every organisation in this article that works in rural areas uses an offline mobile app with Salesforce: BOMA, Village Enterprise and iDE use TaroWorks, and Grameen built its own before turning it into TaroWorks.

Several started with a single project. HODI's system began with one savings group programme in 2016 and covered all its projects by 2019. BOMA added GPS tracking and timesheets after its original monitoring system was running.

Most worked with an outside consultant. Vera Solutions set up the systems for BOMA and HODI, and says it has delivered more than 100 projects in Africa. Vera itself grew out of monitoring and evaluation work for Grassroot Soccer in South Africa in 2010.

Costs and limits

The licences may be free, but setting up Salesforce is not. Designing the system, moving old records into it and training staff usually require paid consultants. Organisations also need someone to maintain the system. Grassroot Soccer, which works in South Africa and Zambia, created a full-time role for a global Salesforce administrator.

Salesforce skills have been scarce in parts of Africa. In West Africa, a programme called West Africa Digital Empowerment, supported by Salesforce staff, set up a two-year Salesforce course at The United Methodist University in Liberia, which is now an associate degree. In 2025, the West Africa Dreamin' conference for Salesforce users was held in Accra for the first time.

Most of the published accounts of NGOs using Salesforce come from the consultancies and software companies involved, including Vera Solutions, TaroWorks and Salesforce itself. Several of the accounts are also several years old. Ghana-based NGOs using Salesforce have published very little about their experience so far; iDE Ghana's Sama Sama and CAMFED are the main exceptions.

BOMA still uses the system it started in 2013. A recent job advertisement for a BOMA mentor in Kakuma, north-western Kenya, lists uploading business and savings group data through TaroWorks among the role's weekly duties.

Sources

This article draws on published accounts from the organisations, their consultants, and the software companies involved.

• →BOMA Project: CGAP, "How BOMA Is Using Technology to Reach the Extreme Poor" (2016); BOMA interim report to Dining for Women (2014); TaroWorks, "Last Mile Management" (2022); BOMA job advertisement, JobWebKenya.
• →Village Enterprise: TaroWorks, "Poverty Graduation Model" (2020); Village Enterprise client profile.
• →CAMFED: Diginomica, "How the cloud helps Camfed empower girls in rural Africa" (2016); Salesforce.org, "Supporting Communities to Deliver Justice and Change at Scale" (2015).
• →HODI: Vera Solutions, "Enhance Your Impact With End-To-End Program Insights"; Peace Insight profile.
• →iDE Ghana and Sama Sama: iDE, "Growing pains build sanitation markets"; iDE Global, "Evidence and Analytics"; Kiva blog on iDE Ghana.
• →Grameen Foundation: CSRwire (2009); Google Earth Outreach; G-FRAS Good Practice Note 14.
• →WaterAid and CRS: Vera Solutions, "5 Organizations Leveraging Amp Impact and Salesforce" (2025).
• →Grassroot Soccer: Salesforce AppExchange job listing.
• →West Africa: Salesforce, "Empowering Self-Sustainable Success in West Africa" (2023); TechLabari on West Africa Dreamin' (2025).