Collect where there is no signal.
Every field team has lost a day's work to a form that needed a connection it did not have. Karagem's forms run on the device: skip logic, calculations, repeat groups, signatures, photos, audio and GPS all work with the phone in aeroplane mode. Submissions queue locally and the outbox empties itself when signal returns — oldest first, duplicates merged on arrival, nothing for anyone to remember to press.
What the phone is holding, at any moment
The reason most offline claims fail is not that the data is lost. It is that nobody can see it. An enumerator finishes a day in Migori with no idea whether four submissions are safe on the handset or gone, and the supervisor has no idea either until somebody drives back into coverage.
So the outbox is a screen, not a background process. It names each held submission, who captured it, what it contains and how long it has waited — and the count only ever goes down.
No signal since 08:52
4 submissions held on this phone. Nothing has been lost, and nothing needs to be re-entered.
- Achieng O.09:14Sending
Seasonal household check-in
38 answers · 3 photos · GPS fix
- Achieng O.09:41Held
Seasonal household check-in
38 answers · 1 photo · GPS fix
- Brian K.10:02Held
Training attendance — Migori
24 signatures · 1 photo
- Njeri W.10:18Held
Seasonal household check-in
38 answers · GPS fix
- Brian K.08:36Sent
Training attendance — Kisii
19 signatures
When the phone finds signal the queue empties itself, oldest first, and duplicates are merged on arrival. Nobody has to remember to press anything.
What survives, exactly
Answers and skip logic
The whole form is on the device, including branches, calculations and repeat groups. A question that should not be asked is not asked, offline or on.
Photos, audio and signatures
Queued as files alongside the submission, not stripped to save space. A training attendance sheet arrives with its nineteen signatures attached.
GPS fixes
Captured from the device, which needs satellites and not a network. A fix taken with no coverage is the same fix as one taken in town.
Validation
Range checks and required fields run at the point of capture, so an impossible number is refused in the homestead rather than found three weeks later.
Timestamps
The capture time is recorded on the device and kept. Sync time is stored separately, so a submission that waited two days does not look like it was collected today.
Drafts
A half-finished interview survives the phone being locked, the battery dying and the app being killed. Nobody re-enters thirty-eight answers.
The awkward questions
Two enumerators registered the same household. Now what?
They are merged, not silently deduplicated. The overnight scan flags the pair, shows both records side by side with what differs, and an officer decides which is right. Duplicates found by a machine and resolved by a person is the only combination that survives an audit.
The phone was lost before it synced.
That data is gone, and no software can honestly say otherwise. What we do instead is make the window small and visible: the outbox count is on the enumerator's home screen and in the supervisor's dashboard, so “Achieng has had four submissions held for two days” is a thing somebody notices on Tuesday rather than at month end.
Someone edited a form while the team was in the field.
Submissions carry the version of the form they were captured on. An answer collected against question 4 of nine does not silently reappear under a question that replaced it.
Can they fake it — sit under a tree and invent interviews?
That is what the data quality checks are for: GPS outliers, interviews completed suspiciously fast, and values outside the range the indicator allows are all flagged for review before anything reaches a report.
If you already collect offline with Kobo or ODK
Then keep doing that. Karagem imports a KoboToolbox or ODK form as a survey and pulls submissions hourly, and adds the part those tools deliberately leave out: indicators, approvals, forecasting and funder reports on top of the data you are already collecting. Nobody has to retrain a field team to get a donor dashboard.