Jakub Nemec
Jakub is the Executive Director for Salanga and the design lead behind Kinaki.
Jakub has a BA in International Territorial Studies and MA in International Development. He is an experienced and engaging trainer with over 10 years of experience training development practitioners and students in safety and security, proposal writing, and monitoring and evaluation.
Jakub began his career in international development working in Turkey, Ghana and Mongolia. Jakub has a passion for the safety and security of aid workers. Through his work he realized that poorly trained and poorly prepared aid workers were putting humanitarian and development programs at risk, ultimately doing a disservice to the people they were intending to help. In 2007 he and his colleague founded Salanga as an organization to train aid workers and organizations in personal safety and security management.
Since then Salanga has expanded its focus to include monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning (MEAL), proposal writing and technical expertise for NGOs. Jakub has supported teams in countries like Haiti, Niger, Philippines, Cambodia and Rwanda – to name a few – in proposal writing, project implementation and MEAL. Through these experiences he noticed that the challenges to meet reporting requirements, tight timelines and other administrative needs were having an impact on implementing teams’ ability to remain focused on community engagement and to meet community needs. In 2013 he and his colleagues at Salanga developed Kinaki, a MEAL tool to help make data collection, analysis and reporting easier and more efficient. In developing Kinaki his goal was to make using project data more accessible and intuitive so project teams can spend more time working with communities and using data to inform their projects. Jakub has trained numerous project teams in mobile data collection, which works hand-in-hand with Kinaki to make monitoring and evaluation more efficient.
Jakub uses his experience working with project teams to work with our software developers to lead the design process for Kinaki, engaging users and the development community in the process. He ensures Kinaki remains true to its original purposes, to be intuitive and easy-to-use; accessible for clients working in all contexts; and flexible enough to measure all kinds of data.
Volunteer work is an important part of Jakub’s life. Jakub served as a volunteer board member of the Ontario Council of International Cooperation (OCIC) from 2015-2016. He currently volunteers with Romea, an organization providing scholarships to students from the Roma community, providing programmatic support.
