Patil, Sumeet R.
Gopalakrishnan, Lakshmi
Sai, Vishal Sabasu
Matikanya, Richard
Rajpal, Payal
Article History
Received: 20 May 2022
Accepted: 5 December 2023
First Online: 23 January 2024
Declarations
:
: Institutional Review Board oversight for this study was provided by Keresa Independent Ethics Committee which is registered with Central Drugs Standard Control Organization of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (India) (IRB Approval Document Number: ECR/308/Indt/KA/2018 dated 06 March 2021). All participants were informed about the aims of the study, that their participation was voluntary, and that they could withdraw participation at any time without consequences. In addition, signed informed consent was collected from all the study participants on tablets except when respondents refused to sign, and a verbal consent had to be administered. The procedures for obtaining written or verbal consent to participate in the study were approved by the Keresa Independent Ethics Committee. As a part of the enrolment on Tiko Platform, all Rafikis had given permission to be contacted for promotional and research activities which enabled NEERMAN to use the backend data for sampling purposes upon signing a non-disclosure agreement with Triggerise. The procedures for obtaining informed written or verbal consent to participate in the study was approved by the Institutional Review Board. All methods were carried out in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations.
: Not applicable.
: NEERMAN (authors—SP, VS, LG) were hired under a commercial contract to conduct evaluation of Triggerise's Tiko platform in India. As independent external evaluators, authors had complete autonomy on methods, data collection, analysis, and reporting. The decision to publish an article based on above evaluation was entirely NEERMAN's. RM (formerly, Chief Operations Officer, Triggerise) and PR (formerly, India Country Director, Triggerise) were involved in review of research protocol especially related to methods related to use of their proprietary backend data in sampling, reviewing theory of change, shortlisting of primary outcomes for the evaluation, listing of research questions beyond impact evaluation, questionnaire development, in discussing interim analyses and results (helped explain mechanisms of observed impacts or lack of impacts from programmatic perspectives), and contribution to the manuscript (editing, ensuring description of the intervention is accurate, contributed to developing recommendations for the sector based on their experience). PR was an employee of Triggerise India until March 2021 when data collection for this evaluation was concluded, and she declares no further competing interest. RM was COO at Triggerise at the time of reviewing and submitting this paper to the journal and thus declares competing interest in commissioning the evaluation and in his role of a reviewer during the evaluation, but he has not suggested any revision to the manuscript other than to description of the intervention. SP, VS, LG declare no further competing interest as no commercial relation existed with Triggerise at the time development of this manuscript was started.