How does Dioptra work?

The cost analysis methodology in Dioptra applies an ingredients-based approach to costing (Levin and McEwan), aligned with the Grand Bargain Cash workstream guidance on cost-efficiency analysis of basic needs programs, the Cost Analysis Guidance for USAID-Funded Education Activities, the Cost Analysis Methodology at the IRC, and the GHCC guidelines for estimating the costs of health interventions.

Instead of relying on analysts to develop an ingredients list “from scratch”, Dioptra taps into the reality of how implementing organizations are funded and uses existing accounting information from the awards which funded the interventions being studied. Dioptra pulls in data on all the ingredients funded by a particular award or awards (including program costs, support costs, indirect costs), then asks program staff to narrow down to the ingredients specifically used for the intervention being analyzed.

Dioptra automatically uses the organization’s available financial transaction data (see Data Connections below) for an analysis. By automating data collection, the time needed to conduct a cost analysis can be reduced from several days to a few hours, minimizing the extra burden on field staff’s daily work.

Dioptra uses cost-efficiency metrics that are commonly agreed-upon in sectoral forums for over 20 activities to ensure comparability of results. For each activity, standard output measures are built in to Dioptra to enable the calculation of these common metrics.

This is important to achieve rigorous, consistent analysis and to transparently demonstrate what costs are included. Dioptra includes the cost categories of shared and indirect costs to show the “fully loaded” costs of implementing an activity and avoid artificial differences between the apparent cost-efficiencies due to differences in funding shared and indirect costs.

Since it is not possible to easily observe how much individual shared cost items contribute to the activity being analyzed compared to other activities in the same project, Dioptra helps to calculate a suggested percentage that can be easily applied to shared costs, based on the Grand Bargain Cash workstream’s shared cost allocation method.

Upon completion of an analysis, Dioptra displays the results alongside available data points from other similar programs to facilitate comparison and understand what features are likely to drive differences in the cost-efficiency if programs are implemented differently or in different places.

Dioptra is hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Each organization that adopts Dioptra will be given an independent instance of the application to enforce data privacy and separation between organizations. NGOs also have the option to host their instance in an AWS account owned by their organization.

Instances of Dioptra may be configured to use one of two available authentication mechanisms: (1) a native login where credentials are created and stored within the tool itself, or (2) enterprise single sign-on (SSO) via OneLogin, Okta, or Microsoft Azure Active Directory.

Each Dioptra instance has a transaction data store for that organizations’ financial transaction data, hosted in the Dioptra network. Dioptra implements a data pipeline allowing NGOs to upload data into the transaction data store, by placing a CSV file in either an AWS S3 bucket or through an SFTP server. The creation of the CSV file is entirely in the hands of the NGO using Dioptra, giving maximum control over what data is shared into the application. For more details on the hosting, data transportation, and security features of Dioptra, please see the full software documentation.