In a world awash with data dashboards and evaluation reports, it’s easy to forget the people behind the numbers. In the development sector, lengthy assessments often get lost in technical language, obscuring the emotions, insights, and lived realities that statistics alone can’t capture.
Folktale brings those hidden perspectives to light, transforming real-life stories into measurable insights that guide meaningful change.
Founded by Sarah Mak, Folktale is a technology platform that empowers communities to film and share their own stories, using any device, online or offline. These first-person video narratives help organizations enhance monitoring, evaluation, and learning by adding rich, human context that spreadsheets simply can’t provide.
Drawing on her background in international public health and psychology, and her deep commitment to story-led change, Sarah partnered with David Lloyd-Lewis to launch Folktale during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when travel restrictions exposed the limitations of traditional fieldwork and reporting. Their solution: a tool that places storytelling directly in the hands of communities, ensuring programs stay connected to the voices they’re meant to serve.
In this episode of Credo Voices, Sarah shares how Folktale supports people to tell their own stories, on their own terms. Organizations create simple video templates and send them to participants, who respond by recording short, guided clips. Each video is securely stored, transcribed, and tagged within the platform, allowing teams to filter stories by theme, align them with indicators, and build multimedia reports that blend qualitative richness with quantitative structure.
At the heart of Folktale is a commitment to ethical storytelling and data protection. Every story is shared with informed consent, and contributors retain control over how their narratives are used. With strong privacy protocols and a people-first design, Folktale ensures communities are not treated as extractive sources of content but as storytellers, decision-makers, and custodians of their experiences.
By turning lived experiences into structured insight, Folktale advances SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). It transforms how impact is documented and understood, ensuring that people remain at the heart of development.
“Behind every statistic is a story, and behind every story is a solution,” says Awele Okigbo, CEO of Credo Advisory. “Folktale elevates community voices, making impact more inclusive and more accountable.” Listen to the full episode on Spotify and visit our website for more information. Learn more about Sarah Mak and her work, follow her on LinkedIn and explore Folktale on their website. New episodes of Credo Voices are released monthly on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube as part of Credo Advisory’s commitment to advancing the Sustainable Development Goals and fostering a global community of change-makers.