National Toshaos Council Community Data Platform

The Cobra Collective is working with the National Toshaos Council of Guyana and Conservation International Guyana to design and build a community monitoring and data management platform that will ultimately serve all 252 Indigenous villages across the country’s ten regions. Drawing on Cobra Collective’s 25 years of continuous participatory research with Indigenous communities in Guyana, the project puts village-level ownership and locally meaningful indicators at the centre of the system’s design.

The platform comprises three integrated modules. The Village Project Tracker allows communities to log and monitor their own development projects, built using DHIS2’s Capture App with custom dashboards for real-time oversight. The Impact Indicator Dashboard tracks 59 indicators across six themes - Education, Environment, Governance, Health, Livelihoods, and Culture - giving villages and the NTC a shared evidence base for decision-making. A Village Support & Knowledge Hub, built as a web platform on existing cloud infrastructure, provides communities with accessible resources and guidance.

Development follows a co-design principle: community-defined project data and village indicators are stabilised and validated before technical configuration begins, ensuring the system reflects what villages themselves consider meaningful to track rather than imposing external metrics. Field testing is being carried out directly with the three pilot communities of Karrau, Tapakuma, and Great Falls, combining structured feedback sessions with hands-on trials of data collection tools, so that the platform is refined against real village conditions and workflows before wider rollout.

A core objective is sustainability beyond the life of the project: NTC technical staff are receiving structured capacity-building so that system administration, configuration, and ongoing data management can be handled internally once Cobra Collective’s direct involvement ends. In-person training across the pilot communities is planned to consolidate this transition, positioning the NTC to independently maintain and expand the platform as a long-term tool for Indigenous-led governance and monitoring across Guyana.