Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation Kulmis, a digital platform bringing programme evidence into one analytical environment for SDC's work in Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Somaliland

SDC's programmes across Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Somaliland run in fragile and conflict-affected contexts. The evidence those programmes depend on, project monitoring, political economy analysis, conflict trends, geospatial data and partner reporting, lived in five places at once, and the hard part was making it accessible and usable for the people deciding what happens next. Kulmis was developed to demonstrate how those sources could be brought together and analysed in a more integrated and visual way.

Adaca built a digital platform integrating project information, contextual analysis, geospatial data and partner evidence into a single analytical environment, with data visualisation and geospatial analysis to support project oversight and evidence-informed discussion. The platform grew dashboard by dashboard, each answering a question the programme was already asking: a programme-wide home view with project markers, comments and notifications; map-based analysis with thematic layers spanning displacement, food security, market prices, nutrition and health facilities; delivery tracked against logframes across the portfolio; risk data, matrix and trends for every project; stakeholder relationships mapped per project; implementing-partner capacity development tracked across projects and partners; a Context Sensitivity Score for each project's operating environment; and field reporting with an approval workflow, notifications and PDF export, open to implementing partners and donors. SDC selected the team through its public procurement process, and the engagement ran on agile methodology from its first month, with weekly sessions aligned to production releases from late 2022 onwards.

Phase 0 began in February 2022, the pilot was released in August and the core dashboards were in production by November 2022. In 2023 the platform took on new thematic data across the region and a redesigned home dashboard, and data hosting moved to an Africa region to bring performance closer to users. From 2024 the reporting and approval workflows, onboarding flows and access for implementing partners and donors opened the platform beyond SDC, with continuous refinement into 2025. The platform demonstrated the feasibility and value of integrating multiple datasets into a single decision-support environment, showed how digital tools can support evidence-informed remote project management in fragile contexts, and generated learning on the organisational conditions a digital solution needs before adoption sustains itself: user engagement, governance, change management and alignment with institutional digital strategies.