Our company was set up in 2011 as a vehicle to enable a handful of us to carry on work in South Sudan and Sierra Leone that we’d begun with Booz and Company. We called it Charlie Goldsmith Associates because that was quick and true.
Ten years on, our name has begun showing its age. There are now sixty of us, majority African nationals in every function and at every level. Just over a year ago, we joined Lutheran World Relief and IMA World Health as part of the Corus International family, an ensemble of global organizations working together to deliver the holistic, lasting solutions needed to overcome the interconnected challenges of poverty, health care access and climate change.
The name also doesn’t quite capture how, increasingly, this was the place a government or a partner could come if they needed “an app for that” quickly and built so as to be accessible to the widest range of users, even in hard-to-reach and low connectivity places.
We also don’t want clients and partners believing Charlie Goldsmith is a dead dude in a big wig and get a shock when the real CG turns up on their Zoom...
So, as of today, we shall be trading under the name of CGA Technologies.
Building on past successes
Over the past ten years, we have worked to deliver national-scale, sustainable positive change in fragile and poor countries where we operate. We’ve particularly specialized in doing that:
- by increasing participation and achievement in education
- through at-scale cash support to citizens
- by leveraging each to make the other more effective
- and by combining, in one team, a full suite of skills...
- from strategy and policy design and support...
- ....to information systems and technology approaches suitable for these contexts, developed specially by our team of coders...
- ....to on-ground implementation and operationalization.
We are still busy in South Sudan, where school enrolment tripled from 0.9m in 2014 to 2.7m at the start of 2020, and where we are excited to be going back to our ‘roots’ supporting a major USAID-funded programme of construction for new and improved schools that will increase availability of education in the hardest to reach places.
In Sierra Leone, Hannah, Muniru and the team delivered the www.sleams.org teacher attendance system for the Teaching Service Commission this year and digitised every teacher’s file in 2020.
We now serve a range of funding clients, including the Government of Sierra Leone, and UK, German, Norwegian, Canadian and multilateral funding partners. And we work with a range of partners, including World University Service of Canada, Give Directly, Link Education International, FHI 360, and many more.
With these clients and partners, we’re undertaking education work in six countries, and have been busy on health things for Somalia and Sierra Leone. We are supporting the Government of Malawi’s national Social Cash Transfers Programme with technical assistance and MIS development. We are continuing social protection systems and policy work in several countries. Also, this year we are looking forward to starting a big new assignment in Mali.
Being in touch
Our new website, www.cgatechnologies.org.uk is more comprehensive of the things we’ve done, and will be of the things we are thinking and doing.
There is a mailing list on there that we will send occasional useful material to, particularly about open source materials we are making available.
On social media, you can find us on Twitter (@CGATech_UK) for development policy things and updates on what we are delivering, LinkedIn at the same address, Facebook (@cgatech), YouTube, where we are progressively putting online our trainings/manuals, and Github, where you will find our open source code.
Our "Ziggurat” logo gives way to the logo used by the Corus International family. Our old email addresses still function, but our new ones you start can using to reach us are firstnamelastname@cgatechnologies.org.uk. Clients and funders can rest assured that there is nothing to be done at this time on contracts, accounts, etc.
We look forward to working with you to serve the poorest this year and beyond.
Please do get in touch if you would like to know more, or just because it has been a while.