Dear Friends of Primero,
As our new year gets underway and our calendars start to fill up again, I want to take a moment to share my appreciation with the Primero Community for a very special 2024. Not only did we make an important contribution to programmes all over the world, but we also celebrated Primero’s 10th anniversary. This is an important achievement and testament to our commitment to sustainability.
As the global Director of Child Protection and Migration at UNICEF, I serve as the Chair of the Primero Board. With over 300 organizations globally using Primero, we represent a broad partnership of rights-based organizations and duty bearers working together to make change for children and survivors of violence.
I am proud of the fact that Primero is a digital initiative deeply rooted in protection programming. Ten years ago, when I was first introduced to Primero, I was working as the Chief of Child Protection for UNICEF Somalia. Primero was still in the very early stages of development, but even then, the focus was on empowering frontline workers. This was the beginning of the digital transformation of the child protection sector. Ten years later, Primero is the leading digital solution for child protection and gender-based violence case management and incident monitoring in the world.
What is our vision for the next ten years? We see a digitally empowered social services workforce reaching more children and survivors of violence with quality services. We see data driven interventions responding to the needs of at-risk children, but also directly contributing to prevention programming. We see an expanded network of partners - including governments - working in a coordinated, integrated manner to accelerate achievement of the SDGs and a future that ensures that no child is left behind.
In 2024, our digital transformation journey has seen us reach new levels of scale, form new partnerships for impact, and invest in improvements to our products and services. With great appreciation to the Primero Community for their contributions, I’d like to share a few of our joint achievements from 2024:
Strengthening and expanding our community:
• As a marker of the maturity of Primero’s governance structures, we convened our 100th consecutive monthly Primero Coordination Committee meeting in May. The Primero Board welcomed UNHCR’s active membership. UNHCR is now leading and funding Primero implementations in multiple contexts. Our partnership with the World Food Programme led to the piloting of their SaferShare module for PSEA in South Sudan.
• We also launched new private sector partnership with Salus, a USA-based software-as-a-service company offering Primero-powered tools to US and Canadian markets.
• The Primero Global Meeting and 10-year celebration was held in November in Nairobi, Kenya. It was attended by +100 people representing governments, civil society, and tech and UN partners from 41 countries.
• The quarterly Primero Data Challenge webinar series convened +200 members of the community around improved data usage, with the team from Burkina Faso winning first place for their amazing work on integrated PowerBI dashboards.
• In 2024, with support from the UNICEF Office of Innovation, Primero kicked off UNICEF’s first-ever decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The Primero DAO is an open global community connecting users and open-source developers, which collects and votes on proposals and is backed by a cryptocurrency treasury. This effort to “democratize the product roadmap” shows that Primero is committed to realizing its potential as a digital public good.
Scaling up for impact:
• In 2024, new Primero rollouts went live in 13 countries (Benin, Cameroon, China, Ethiopia, Guinea, Mauritania, Niger, Pakistan, Panama, the Philippines, Timor Leste, Uganda (partner-led), Ukraine), a 19% increase over 2023. With 80 live implementations across 62 countries and territories and more than 16,000 active users, Primero continues to scale up globally. To date, more than 1.7 million children and survivors of violence have received digitally enabled services through Primero.
• Major trends include: a dramatic increase in requests from high income countries, with deployments underway in Hungary (Budapest), Italy, and United Arab Emirates. Important scale-ups within existing implementations, including in Ghana, Iraq, Nigeria, Trinidad and Tobago and Ukraine. In Bangladesh, Primero was expanded to the new location, Bhasan Char, where the Cox’s Bazar refugees are being relocated. This is an excellent example of how Primero helps ensure the continuum of care.
• There was a spike in government-led implementations, including a go-live in China (11 counties) and across five states in Pakistan (Baluchistan, Gilgit, Khyber, Sindh, Islamabad). In the Philippines, Primero is branded as the Integrated Electronic Case Management System (IECMS), a solution that integrates the various programs and institutions in the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). In Ethiopia, the national child protection authorities have fully embraced Primero/CPIMS+, with a national scale up underway. See their inspirational video here.
• The MRMIMS+ module had a big year, with rollouts in Cameroon, Israel/State of Palestine, Mozambique, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria and Sudan. Great work MRM Team!
Continuous improvements:
• Primero continues to evolve and grow, responding to the needs of global users. New features include improved search, calculated fields, case to incident links, verify feature for MRMIMS+, referral workflow enhancements, push notifications, and custom UI, palette, and branding features.
• New product extensions include the prototype for the Child Functioning Module, an innovative methodology for capturing data about children with disabilities. An integration with the RapidPro, UNICEF’s open-source messaging platform, is also being piloted as part of the UNICARE initiative, a digital solution for community feedback and redress mechanisms. UNICARE is currently being piloted in Türkiye and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
• The Primero Team, working with UNICEF ICTD, completed and tested the Primero disaster recovery plan. Additional investments were made in security, including a new threat modelling service and dynamic scanning tool, as well as continued work to mainstream single-sign-on and multifactor authentication.
Recognition and visibility:
• In 2024, the Digital Public Goods Alliance recertified Primero as a DPG. Primero was invited to present at the launch event the UN Digital Community, and the UN 2.0 Quintet of Change featured Primero as a model digital intervention.
• The UNICEF Office of Innovation published a Primero article Revolutionizing Child Protection Across the Globe in its blog series, which was later amplified in a UNICEF LinkedIn message to celebrate Primero’s 10th anniversary, an account with almost 5 million followers.
• Primero’s social media channels, now using the #primeroprotects handle, launched a new communications strategy. Our YouTube channel continues to exceed targets, with more than 15,000 views in 2024 totaling almost 500 hours of watch time. Check out these inspirational videos from our government partners in Trinidad and Tobago and Ethiopia.
Optimized support and business model:
• In 2024, we implemented the third year of the Primero Sustainability Plan with an innovative subscription payments model, supported by a pooled fund. This model is proving to be very effective at distributing costs, balancing budgets and ensuring long-term product viability. In 2025, the team expects Primero fees to drop by ~5% again, for the fourth consecutive year. Economies of scale benefit all.
• Primero’s technical assistance capacity continues to grow, with dedicated team members in five regional offices. In 2024, ESARO, MENARO and ECARO each recruited a specialist to support their country offices with Primero rollouts and other technical support.
• The Primero Support Hub has now been picked up by UNICEF Supply Division as an extensible, open-source support platform. Now being offered as a hosted service, the Support Hub is available to UNICEF product teams as an affordable, adaptable way to support users.
There are big plans in place for 2025, and we invite you to be a part of them. Some of the things we are working on include:
• A new menu of value-added services, including data visualization and custom branding
• New partnerships and collaborations around open data standards, linkages with social protection, and expanded private sector partnerships
• Continued evidence generation and research, including a rigorous analysis of Primero’s contributions to UNICEF’s programmes using CSI (country standard indicators) data
• Significant investments in the Primero Support Hub, included AI-powered support and internationalization
• The scaling up of the Child Functioning Module for disability classification, along with a package of capacity building and support services
• And more than 20 new deployments in planning
We invite you to share this widely within your networks, and to reach out to the team if you’d like to share your ideas to make Primero better.
Happy New Year and we look forward to working with you in 2025.
Sheema Sen Gupta
Chair of the Primero Board