Coordination across four agencies, nine countries.
The Muskoka Fund, formerly known as the Fonds Français Muskoka, was created at the 2010 G8 Summit in Muskoka, Canada, as the French government's commitment to reduce maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent mortality in West and Central Africa. The Fund operates as a joint coordination mechanism between four United Nations agencies: the World Health Organization, UN Women, the United Nations Population Fund, and UNICEF. The mechanism works across nine francophone countries, Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo, all of which face high maternal and child mortality rates and share the structural challenges of strengthening health systems under fiscal and capacity constraints.
The coordination challenge embedded in this design is significant. Four agencies with distinct mandates, distinct internal cultures, and distinct programmatic instruments work together at country level, regional level, and headquarters level, alongside the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs that funds the mechanism, alongside the host governments whose health systems the work strengthens, alongside the implementation partners on the ground. The substantive deliverables of the Fund, the high-impact interventions on maternal and child health, depend on the institutional discipline that holds the coordination together. Without that discipline, the productive friction between agencies degrades into duplication, gaps, and missed opportunities for the populations the Fund exists to serve.
UNICEF, on behalf of the joint Muskoka mechanism, mandated PANEOTECH to design and deliver the collaborative platform that supports the institutional coordination. The platform consolidates the documentary, collaborative, and operational tooling the Fund's teams need across the four agencies, the nine countries, and the multiple coordination levels into a single environment built for the coordination work itself rather than imposed on top of it.
The mandate. Build the institutional collaborative platform the Muskoka Fund mechanism needs to coordinate across four UN agencies, nine francophone countries, and the multiple levels of intervention that the joint mandate requires. Consolidate the documentary library, the collaborative working environment, and the operational tools into a single environment that serves the substance of the coordination rather than its appearance.
Three architectural pillars, one coordination platform.
The platform is structured around the three substantive functions the Muskoka Fund coordination requires. The documentary library makes the collective intellectual production of the four agencies findable. The collaborative platform makes the inter-agency working environment tractable. The operational tools layer makes the planning and resourcing of joint activities navigable. Each pillar addresses a distinct dimension of the coordination work and connects to the others through the shared identity layer that lets users move across them without context switching.
Multi-Format Documentary Library
An unlimited-capacity repository hosting the full range of content the Muskoka Fund produces: Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations, PDF reports, video and audio recordings, photographs, and infographics. Free-text search and metadata-based search complement each other for users who know what they are looking for and users who do not. Content preview lets users assess relevance before downloading. Offline accessibility supports the field teams whose connectivity cannot be assumed.
Collaborative Working Environment
A working environment for the inter-agency teams the Muskoka coordination depends on. Content sharing without size limits across the user base. Online collaborative editing on shared documents. Structured exchange spaces, MuskoTeams, scoped to each coordination level: intra-country inter-agency teams, inter-country exchanges, country-to-regional dialogue, the regional Technical Committee, regional-to-MEAE coordination, intra-agency working groups, and the Secretariat-Presidency interface. The architecture mirrors the institutional reality of the coordination mechanism rather than flattening it.
Good Practices and Training Resources
The collaborative environment surfaces good practices identified through user exchanges, the results of operational research, and the innovations that emerge from the field. Training resources are catalogued and cross-referenced with the external sites where they are also hosted, so the platform serves as the institutional starting point for the Fund's capacity-building work without duplicating content unnecessarily.
Activity Tracking and Notifications
Configurable notifications alert users to content updates relevant to their work, without overwhelming them with the full activity stream of the platform. Activity tracking surfaces the collaborative engagement the coordination depends on, supporting the accountability dimension of inter-agency work that the joint mandate requires.
Interactive Project Map
A geographic visualisation of the Muskoka Fund's projects across the nine francophone beneficiary countries. Users can navigate from the continental view to country-level detail, surface the projects active in each country, and trace the geographic distribution of the Fund's portfolio at any moment in time. The map is the spatial entry point for the coordination work.
Coordination Calendar and Directories
An interactive calendar showing activities at each level of the mechanism for joint planning, including the funding receipt dates per agency and per coordination level. A consultant roster organised around the Fund's thematic areas. A Who's Who directory of the Muskoka teams with searchable profiles. The operational tools layer turns institutional knowledge that previously lived in scattered emails and spreadsheets into navigable infrastructure.
Engineered for multi-agency, multi-country, multi-level work.
The architectural choices follow directly from the operational reality of inter-agency coordination across nine countries with the connectivity, institutional, and security constraints of the West and Central African contexts. Each constraint shapes a specific design decision in the platform.
Single identity layer across the three pillars
The library, the collaborative environment, and the tools layer share a single identity layer with role-based access control. A WHO country focal point in Niger, a UNICEF regional adviser in Dakar, an UNFPA technical specialist in Cotonou, and a UN Women programme officer in Bamako all log in once and navigate the platform according to their role and their coordination scope. The architecture supports the inter-agency reality of the user base without imposing the silos that single-agency platforms inevitably produce.
Engineered for low-connectivity contexts
The platform was engineered for the connectivity constraints of the field teams who use it. Content is structured for low-bandwidth retrieval. The library supports offline access so that field teams without continuous connectivity can consult the materials they need. Synchronisation handles the transition from offline to connected gracefully, queuing updates and surfacing them when bandwidth returns. The discipline reflects the actual operating conditions of the Muskoka Fund's field teams rather than the headquarters assumption that connectivity is universal.
Coordination-scope subgroups as a structural pattern
The MuskoTeams subgroups follow the actual coordination structure of the Muskoka mechanism rather than a generic chat-and-channels metaphor. Country-level inter-agency teams form one subgroup type. Inter-country thematic exchanges form another. The country-to-regional and regional-to-MEAE channels form their own dedicated spaces. The Secretariat-to-Presidency interface gets its own scope. The architecture respects the institutional reality that coordination at this scale has its own taxonomy, and a platform that ignores the taxonomy degrades into noise.
Search architecture across heterogeneous content
The library supports search across heterogeneous content types, from formal evaluation reports to field photographs to recorded webinars. Free-text search handles the cases where users know the substance they are looking for. Metadata-based search handles the cases where they need to filter by country, by year, by agency, by thematic area, or by document type. The combination is what makes the platform useful for the analytical work the Fund's teams actually do, rather than just decorative as content repositories often become.
Security architecture for institutional data
The platform handles institutional data the four UN agencies treat as sensitive. The security architecture aligns with UNICEF's information security expectations: TLS transport encryption, role-based access control, audit trails on document access and modification, granular permissions per document and per subgroup, and the data protection discipline the agencies' policies require. The architecture preserves the controlled openness the inter-agency work depends on without exposing the platform to the broader internet.
Capacity transfer for institutional ownership
The engagement included structured capacity transfer to the UNICEF and Muskoka Fund teams that operate the platform after delivery. Administrator training on configuration, content governance, user management, and notification rules. User training on the day-to-day operation of the library, the collaborative environment, and the tools layer. The institution owns the platform operationally, with documentation that lets the teams evolve it as the Fund's coordination scope evolves over the renewal cycles France has committed to since 2010.
Built for nine countries, four agencies, one mechanism.
The platform serves the institutional actors whose work constitutes the Muskoka Fund mechanism. The four UN agencies, the World Health Organization, UN Women, the United Nations Population Fund, and UNICEF, use the platform for inter-agency coordination at country, regional, and global levels. The country teams in Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo use it for the documentary, collaborative, and operational work that joint country presence requires. The regional Technical Committee uses it for inter-country exchange and synthesis. The Secretariat and Presidency use it for the institutional governance that the joint mechanism depends on. The French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs that funds the mechanism uses it for the visibility and accountability that long-horizon multilateral funding requires.
Institutional ownership and operational continuity.
The Muskoka Fund Collaborative Platform was developed by PANEOTECH for UNICEF, the United Nations agency that contracted the platform on behalf of the joint Muskoka Fund mechanism. PANEOTECH led the architectural design, the content modelling, the offline-capable engineering for low-connectivity contexts, the inter-agency identity layer, the collaborative environment, the operational tools layer, and the administration interfaces that let the institution own the platform after delivery. The work was conducted under UNICEF's technical supervision, with the platform reviewed iteratively by representative panels of the future user community to ensure alignment with the actual coordination needs of the Fund's teams across the four agencies and the nine countries.
The platform is in production for the institutional users of the Muskoka Fund mechanism, with capacity transfer delivered alongside the platform itself. UNICEF and the Muskoka Fund hold full operational ownership, with the documentation, training, and post-deployment support designed to carry the platform forward through the renewal cycles France has committed to since the 2010 G8 commitment. The architecture preserves the path for the platform to evolve as the coordination scope evolves, and as the Fund's mandate is renewed in subsequent cycles.
