Dev Case Studies

204 real development case studies from 117 countries — searchable, filterable, and fully cited.

Part of the ImpactMojo Learning Platform and the OpenStacks for Change initiative.

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About

Dev Case Studies is a practitioner-oriented library of real-world development case studies drawn from across the Global South and beyond. Each case documents a programme, intervention, or policy with evidence of outcomes — positive, negative, or mixed — and ties every claim back to a citable source.

The library is designed to complement theory with evidence: to help practitioners, students, and researchers understand what development work actually looks like in practice. Read more on the About & Methodology page.

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Features

Feature	Description
204 case studies	Spanning 117 countries across the Global South and beyond, with ~870 cited references.
Search & filter	Full-text search plus faceted filters by topic, region, and decade — with an experimental research-question matcher.
Insights dashboard	Live statistics on how the collection is distributed across topics, regions, and decades. Click a bar to filter.
Evidence tiers	Every study is auto-tagged strong / moderate / emerging based on reference count and causal-identification methods.
Saved studies	Bookmark cases to a personal reading list stored in your browser — no account required.
Reading experience	Reading-time estimates, a scroll progress bar, share links, and per-study Cornell notes you can export as Markdown.
Related studies map	A small literature map surfaces cases connected by shared topic or region.
Light / dark / system theme	Persisted theme with a three-way toggle.
Fast & durable	Zero runtime dependencies — static HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS.

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Tech Stack

Layer	Technology	Purpose
Frontend	Vanilla HTML / CSS / JavaScript	No-framework, no-runtime-dependency search and browse
Data	Per-study JSON (source of truth)	Case study content and metadata
Build	Zero-dependency Node (ESM) pipeline	Validates data and generates the card index, search index, stats, and sitemap
CI	GitHub Actions	Validates the schema, fails on data drift, and checks links
Hosting	GitHub Pages	Static site deployment

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Project Structure

dev-case-studies/
├── index.html            # Library: search, filter, insights dashboard
├── study.html            # Individual case study view
├── about.html            # About & methodology
├── css/style.css         # Design system (light/dark)
├── js/app.js             # Search, filter, render, bookmarks, insights
├── scripts/
│   ├── build.mjs         # Validate studies + generate derived data
│   └── serve.mjs         # Zero-dependency local dev server
├── data/
│   ├── studies/          # ← source of truth: one JSON per case study
│   ├── master-list.json  # generated — card index (do not edit)
│   ├── search-index.json # generated — search index (do not edit)
│   ├── stats.json        # generated — dashboard statistics (do not edit)
│   └── README.md         # data model & pipeline docs
├── sitemap.xml           # generated
└── package.json          # npm scripts (build / validate / dev)

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Local Development

git clone https://github.com/Varnasr/dev-case-studies.git
cd dev-case-studies

npm run dev        # serve locally on http://localhost:8000
npm run build      # regenerate master-list, search index, stats, sitemap
npm run validate   # CI check: validate the data & fail if artefacts drift

No dependencies are installed — the build and dev server use only the Node standard library (Node ≥ 18).

The data model and the recognised study-content headings are documented in data/README.md.

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Contributing

Contributions are welcome — additional case studies, corrections, or improved citations.

To add a case study:

1. Create data/studies/<slug>.json following the data model. Include:
   • programme name, country, region, topic, and years of operation
   • a 200–400 word description with cited evidence of outcomes
   • at least two verifiable sources in a ## References section
2. Run npm run build and commit the regenerated data files.
3. Open a pull request. CI (npm run validate) will fail if the generated data is out of sync.

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Part of the ImpactMojo Ecosystem

Related repositories:

• ImpactMojo — Main platform
• development-discourses — 500+ curated open-access research papers
• ImpactLex — Development sector terminology dictionary

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License

MIT License — see LICENSE for details.

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Citation

Sri Raman, V. (2025). Dev Case Studies: 204 real development case studies from 117 countries [Dataset].
ImpactMojo. https://github.com/Varnasr/dev-case-studies