Kobo’s 2025 highlights: 1 billion surveys and a decade of community-led impact

Reflecting on 2025, we look back at a year that marked not just continued growth across our community but also many significant milestones. This year, we celebrated 10 years of impact and 1 billion surveys collected—empowering frontline organizations globally with the tools they need to create data-driven change.

From organizations leveraging KoboToolbox for sustainable development work in Brazil and financial aid programs for conflict-affected families in Ukraine to supporting the Hurricane Melissa response in Jamaica, our community continues to demonstrate how data, purpose, and people can make a difference globally.

Every data point is a human story

In 2025 alone, over 291 million surveys were collected with KoboToolbox. These surveys represent more than just data. Each survey helps organizations listen to communities more closely and better understand their needs.

Spanning local community-based and international organizations, our users collect more than 20 million surveys each month. Here are just a few examples of how organizations are driving impact with our tools.

Helping local fishing communities to lead ocean conservation

In Flores, Indonesia, Blue Ventures uses KoboToolbox to help local fishing communities leverage digital data collection to foster sustainability and community wellbeing.

With real-time, community-owned data, local fishers are able to confirm the effectiveness of traditional practices, strengthen local governance, and take informed action to protect the ocean and improve livelihoods.

Ensuring communities are safe after the Myanmar earthquake

After the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that struck near Mandalay in March 2025, Myanmar Earthquake Committee relied on KoboToolbox to conduct 10,000 post-earthquake building safety assessments and support emergency response for impacted communities.

With detailed GPS data and ground-verified assessments, they were able to coordinate humanitarian aid, help families find safe shelter or return to their homes, and map damaged infrastructure to facilitate the long-term work of rebuilding.

Expanding our training to reach more people

KoboToolbox provides the foundation for data-informed action, and our training ensures that every organization has the skills to maximize their impact. This year, we prioritized strengthening skills for local users on a global scale through hands-on in-person trainings and far-reaching initiatives like our online courses.

In 2025, we trained over 1,700 nonprofit staff and volunteers, including:

• In-person training on KoboToolbox and responsible AI for climate resilience and public health initiatives in Timor-Leste.
• Data essentials virtual training for 148 staff and volunteers from local nonprofits in Tanzania, helping them adopt digital tools for their programming.
• In-person training and co-design workshop for 25 local organizations in Colombia, supporting humanitarian crisis response and gathering vital feedback from frontline teams that rely on our tools.

These are just a few highlights from the trainings Kobo delivered and co-facilitated with our partners this past year. To bolster training opportunities on a global scale, we also launched two new KoboToolbox Academy courses and published an entirely new section of free support articles. Our most recent initiative, launched in December 2025, is a new program to provide free training and KoboToolbox Academy access for humanitarian and climate-focused nonprofits in the Global South.

By providing accessible training opportunities, we are removing cost and technical barriers for resource-limited organizations, especially in the Global South. This puts high quality data tools and the knowledge to use them within everyone’s reach.

Building the future of social impact, together

In 2025, we released important new features and platform enhancements for KoboToolbox, ensuring that our tools continue to evolve with the needs of frontline teams. These include our new Team management feature, which empowers organizations to centralize data and coordinate complex, multi-country projects—removing collaboration barriers so teams can scale their impact. We also expanded our audio recording capabilities to web forms, enabling users to capture detailed interviews on any device and collect crucial information directly from communities.

None of these milestones would be possible without the vibrant ecosystem of partners, donors, and organizations that champion our mission.

Together, our shared efforts earned several meaningful validations in 2025, including:

• A WSIS Prize Champion recognition for our automated transcription and translation tools.
• The Tech for Good Impact Award from the Zendesk Foundation.
• The Candid Platinum Seal of Transparency and the GreatNonprofits Top-Rated Award.
• Continued recognition as a Digital Public Good, a standard we have proudly maintained since 2021.

As we enter 2026, we are already working on the next generation of features, including AI-powered tools designed to optimize how organizations gather and use information—transforming data into meaningful impact for communities.