About Enketo

Overview

Enketo is the name of an open-source project as well as the name of an open-source web application that uses a popular open-source form format.

Enketo has been used all around the world for a wide range of uses from needs assessments in humanitarian aid, to raising historical awareness, to clinical research, to election monitoring.

Enketo's form engine is also available as a separate module and has been used to build several mobile or web applications, such as OpenSRP, Medic, and Survey123 (web) for ArcGIS.

Features

Surveys deployed with Enketo:

  • work offline
  • have beautiful themes and widgets
  • are printer-friendly
  • can use very powerful skip and validation logic
  • run on any device, mobile or desktop, as long as it has a fairly modern browser

Ecosystem

Enketo is part of the OpenRosa/ODK ecosystem. This is great for 2 reasons:

  1. Enketo can be combined with other tools to flexibly create a full-fledged information management system. This has resulted in the adoption of Enketo into many systems. It also means that the Enketo Project can focus on just data collection and do this in the best way possible.
  2. Enketo does not require a long-term commitment by the user. In other words, it is not trying to get you hooked. A user can try out different data collection tools and with few headaches simply switch to an alternative in the future.

Read more about the ecosystem here.

History

Enketo was developed as a follow-up to a 2009 Masters Dissertation at the University of Liverpool on the 'Applicability of Offline-capable Web Technologies for Information Management in Humanitarian Aid'.

After a year of initial development, it was adopted by a lab at Columbia University and first launched in 2012. This was the start of a cascade of adoption by companies and organizations across the world.