Merline
Insight. Evidence. Impact.
The MERL Intelligence Platform, built by JRECC
A decade of research, monitoring, and evaluation expertise — encoded into software for the researchers, NGOs, and government M&E units who currently stitch together spreadsheets, ODK/Kobo, WhatsApp, and manual transcription to run their studies.
Merline is developed and operated by Jaze Research & Evaluation Consultancy Company Limited (JRECC) — built on the same field methodology JRECC has used for over a decade with partners including Plan International, Save the Children, Care International, Malaria Consortium, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Research teams find out too late
Research and M&E organizations run field studies the same broken way almost everywhere, across six recurring failure points.
Survey design starts from a blank page
Turning a research question into validated indicators depends on tacit expertise in senior researchers' heads — not a reusable system.
Collection and monitoring are disconnected
Field data doesn't become a live dashboard. Someone manually pulls it into Excel — days or weeks later.
Data quality problems surface too late
Fabricated responses, skipped questions, or fake GPS points aren't caught until analysis — too late to send someone back.
Qualitative data lives in a separate world
Interviews and FGDs are recorded, transcribed, and analyzed in a different tool — never talking to the same dashboard.
Funders are flying blind mid-project
Donors get a status email or wait for the final report instead of seeing live progress. Problems compound quietly.
Every team rebuilds the wheel
Consultancies patch these gaps with ad hoc internal tools — expensive, non-scalable, and lost when staff leave.
Teams discover design gaps, data quality problems, and qualitative insights weeks after they matter.
Merline closes that gap to hours — across the entire research lifecycle, not just data collection.
Four layers, one research lifecycle
Merline wraps the full lifecycle of a study — from design through funder reporting — in a single connected system.
Conceptualize
Turn a research question into a validated instrument.
- Guided study wizard suggests indicators, sample size, and a draft theory-of-change
- A validated module library of reusable, pre-tested question sets — including Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, and Pidgin translations
Collect
Offline-first quantitative and qualitative capture, together.
- On-device hard constraints, GPS checks, and rushed-interview flags — before submission
- Interviews and FGDs recorded, transcribed, and analyzed on the same project as survey data
Monitor
A live dashboard across quant, qual, and data quality.
- Response rates, coverage, enumerator performance, and quality flags update as data arrives
- The same real-time visibility JRECC built for its own field operations, now productized
Report
Donor-ready reporting, always current.
- Auto-generated, role-based dashboards for clients, field teams, and funders
- Turns weeks-later PDF reports into a live, shareable view
What only Merline offers
Full lifecycle, not one layer
The only platform spanning conceptualize, collect, monitor, and report in one connected system.
A decade of expertise, productized
Validated indicators, instruments, and multi-language modules encoded from JRECC's real fieldwork.
Quant and qual, one project
Interviews and surveys tracked on the same dashboard, in real time — a single picture, not two.
Data quality caught in the field
Hard constraints, GPS checks, and consistency flags stop bad data before submission.
Merline Technologies Ltd.
Merline is being actively built by JRECC's technology team as a licensed venture of the consultancy — packaging a decade of research design, field data collection, and monitoring practice into a platform for the wider research and M&E community. Piloting partners are welcome to reach out.
Get in Touch with JRECC