How Open Tools Change What a Small NGO Can Do

Open source as development infrastructure

When we think about infrastructure for international development, we tend to picture roads, hospitals, and power grids. But there is another kind of infrastructure that is quietly reshaping how development work gets done: open-source software. At the centre of it sits GitHub, a platform that hosts 630 million repositories and, in its own Octoverse 2025 report, more than 180 million developers. Researchers and, increasingly, development practitioners work there too.

For organisations working in South Asia, GitHub is where software engineers store code, and it has also become a platform for sharing research tools, distributing open datasets, collaborating on monitoring frameworks, and building the digital public goods that underpin everything from health systems to climate adaptation. Understanding how it works is essential for development professionals in 2026.

[Illustration 1: The open-source development ecosystem connecting practitioners across South Asia]

Five kinds of open development projects

The development-relevant projects shared on GitHub fall into five broad kinds, each doing a distinct job in the practitioner's toolkit. (A note on the word: a "repository", or repo, is simply the online home of a project, its files, its history, and the discussion around it, all in one public place.)

1. Open data and research tools

Organisations like the World Bank, UNDP, and J-PAL maintain GitHub repositories with open datasets, replication code for impact evaluations, and statistical tools designed for development research. The World Bank's open data repositories alone contain thousands of datasets spanning poverty measurement, health outcomes, education access, and economic indicators across South Asian countries. For a researcher in Dhaka or a programme manager in Colombo, this represents immediate access to data that would have required months of bureaucratic requests a decade ago.

2. Digital public goods

The Digital Public Goods Alliance maintains a registry of digital public goods: open-source software, open standards, open data, open AI systems and open content collections that help attain the Sustainable Development Goals. Projects like DHIS2 (a health information system that Bangladesh adopted nationally in 2009 and that Odisha has used since 2008), OpenSRP (a smart register platform for frontline health workers, with implementations in Bangladesh and Pakistan among others), and Mojaloop (open-source payment infrastructure) are all developed openly on GitHub. These are production systems serving millions of people. DHIS2 alone is in use by ministries of health in 80 countries.

3. Monitoring, evaluation and learning frameworks

A growing number of MEL tools are being built and shared as open-source projects. Survey tools like KoboToolbox, data collection platforms like ODK (Open Data Kit), and analysis frameworks for randomised controlled trials are all GitHub-hosted and community-maintained. For development organisations with limited technology budgets, these tools represent sophisticated capabilities at zero licensing cost: provided they have the technical capacity to deploy and maintain them.

4. Climate and environmental data

Climate adaptation is one of South Asia's most pressing development challenges, and GitHub hosts an expanding collection of tools for climate data analysis. From satellite imagery processing pipelines to flood prediction models, from air quality monitoring dashboards to crop yield forecasting tools, the open-source climate toolkit is growing rapidly. OpenAQ, for open air quality data, and the openair analysis package, both listed below, are two examples. India's own open-source contributions in this space, including tools for monsoon prediction and water resource management, are increasingly cited in international climate research.

5. Civic technology and governance

Civic tech projects that promote transparency, accountability, and citizen engagement are a lively corner of GitHub. Budget transparency tools, Right to Information request trackers, and open election data platforms are being built and forked across South Asian democracies. DataMeet in India, for example, publishes election data and maps, and in-rolls publishes tools for parsing electoral rolls (both listed below). These projects demonstrate how open-source principles (transparency, collaboration, community ownership) align naturally with democratic governance values.

"The most powerful thing about open source in development is not the software itself: it is the culture of collaboration, transparency, and shared ownership that comes with it."

What this means for South Asian practitioners

For development professionals in South Asia, open-source work on GitHub offers both an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity is clear: access to world-class tools, datasets, and collaborative networks at minimal cost. A small NGO in rural Odisha can use the same data collection tools as a World Bank research team. A government data analyst in Sri Lanka can build on the same statistical libraries used by leading universities.

The challenge is capacity. Using these tools well takes a set of skills that many development organisations do not yet have, the habits of working in the open: keeping track of successive versions of a file, reading technical documentation, reporting a problem so the people who maintain a tool can fix it, and occasionally suggesting an improvement. These are rarely taught in development studies programmes. This is precisely the gap that platforms like ImpactMojo aim to bridge. The aim is enough confidence with these tools to find and use what is available, without turning every development professional into a software engineer.

[Illustration 2: Bridging the gap between development practice and open-source tools]

ImpactMojo's own open-source work

ImpactMojo itself is hosted on a public GitHub repository. The source code is under the MIT licence. The courses, handouts and data are public to read and share under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives), and content behind a paid subscription tier is proprietary. We chose this path deliberately because we believe that educational resources for development should be as open as the development data they teach people to analyse.

Beyond the code, the repository is a working example of how a small team can build a full educational platform in the open. From our choice to keep the site as plain, fast-loading web pages to the open tools we use behind the scenes, the main decisions are written up in the repository’s docs folder. We want other organisations building educational content for the development sector to be able to learn from our approach, avoid our mistakes, and build on our code.

What we follow and star on GitHub

To make this concrete, here is a curated look at the repositories and organisations we actively follow and star on GitHub. These are tools and datasets we use, reference, and learn from in our own work.

Organisations we follow

These are the GitHub accounts we track for new releases, datasets, and tools relevant to development practice in South Asia:

Our top starred repositories

From the 90+ repositories we have starred, here are our top recommendations, organised by how development practitioners might use them:

Our Own Open-Source Projects

Beyond ImpactMojo itself, we maintain several open-source projects that serve the development community:

The road ahead

Open development work on GitHub is still maturing. Discoverability remains a challenge: finding the right tool for a specific development context requires knowledge that is not easily searchable. Documentation quality varies wildly. Many promising projects are maintained by a single developer and risk abandonment. And the dominance of English in code, documentation, and discussion excludes practitioners who work primarily in other languages.

These are solvable problems, and South Asian developers and development professionals are well-positioned to solve them. The region's large and growing developer community, combined with deep domain expertise in development challenges, creates the conditions for meaningful contribution to the open-source ecosystem. What is needed is the bridge between these two worlds, and that is exactly the kind of bridge we are trying to build at ImpactMojo.

That bridge includes our courses themselves: almost everything in the ImpactMojo catalog is free to use. The code is MIT-licensed and the content is CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.