At Rojo, we believe in being socially responsible as individuals and as a company. Our focus is to give back to the society and to be sustainable for future generations. Starting from the first day, we have been committed to our social responsibility goals. Recently, together with our long-term customer Achmea, we started a project to help Amani Kids which is a children’s home in Tanzania, providing homeless kids a nurturing place so they can heal.
Each year Achmea makes 0.5% of its net profit available to the Achmea Foundation. Part of that amount is spent on Expert Volunteer Assignments (EVA) in order to use the expertise of Achmea employees and make it available to charity organisations. By sharing knowledge, the Achmea Foundation aims to contribute sustainably to impactful initiatives. This allows organisations to realise more or faster impact and creates opportunities for the personal development of employees.
Some time ago Achmea Foundation had an EVA with a strong IT component for Amani Kids. Nico Heijnen from Achmea, says that he found this assignment interesting from his IT background and perspective, and signed up to give substance to this EVA. Having worked in a previous EVA in India, he was familiar with the Achmea Foundation.
The charity in discussion, Amani Centre for Street Children, rescues children from the streets of Tanzania, and the number has been growing exponentially over the years – now with more than 150 children per year. Unfortunately, too many children have to take care of themselves in Tanzania. Some as young as six years old are homeless and alone. Amani aims to reunite these children with their relatives when possible. They equip the families so they’re self-sustainable. And if a reunion is not possible, Amani helps the kids with shelter and education and ensure they’re reintegrated in society.
They continue supporting these children in the long-term. As a result, at the moment there are more than 800 children in their care. Amani attends to about 250 children who are still on the streets, offering a temporary safe shelter to about 180, supporting more than 400 former street children in their education, in one of their four residential centres, and following up on more than 300 children who they successfully reunited with their families.
Meindert Schaap, the Executive Director at Amani, says “Imagine following up on each child through 5 different paper case files (per child!) and dozens of improvised Excel spreadsheets… That was the nightmare we have lived for the past 15 years”. He mentions that previously when Amani had only one location and was working with 150 children, the spreadsheets approach was manageable however now that Amani has four locations and more children in their care, they needed a better solution.
Nico explains that after some fine-tuning with Amani, he came to the conclusion that it made more sense and would be more efficient to design and implement the requested Case Management System than to travel to Tanzania to pick up the requirements for the system. The requirements were already largely clear and could be further tightened up via telephone contact. He continues “In my search for an implementation partner, I asked Rojo Consultancy if they would like to participate in this assignment and Rojo’s response was extremely positive. I am very grateful to them for that”.
I am so excited that Rojo Consultancy is helping Amani to do an even better job in rescuing street children and giving them positive futures – by building a powerful Child Case Management System & Performance/Impact Measurement System for us!
– Meindert Schaap, Executive Director at Amani
Minimum viable product
Amani needed an easy-to-use case management system; until today they have been using paper forms which were not digitalized structurally making it difficult to generate reports or have overviews. They needed the case management system to keep track of the children, to plan and follow-up on appointments and for reporting. One important requirement was offline availability as the network connection is poor at times.
The minimum viable product (MVP) developed by Rojo for Amani Kids consists of three components all offered by Microsoft to reach a cost-effective and consistent end-product:
- Power Apps: to add and edit information in the database (SharePoint).
- SharePoint Online Lists: database containing the data for the different tables.
- Power BI Report: to view enriched data reports and to set up alerts for events.
The application on Microsoft Power Apps ensures no data is lost even when there isn’t an internet connection. This is a crucial feature given the fact that uninterrupted connection is not possible in Tanzania as previously mentioned. SharePoint online acts as the main database and in case there is no connection the information is saved on Power Apps until there’s connection and data are saved to SharePoint Online successfully. And lastly, Power BI provides detailed reports aided by visuals as well as giving Amani the option to filter and generate reports for specific criteria.
Measuring the change
With the new Database and Reporting System, Amani will be able to drastically improve the impact and efficiency of their work. Meindert says that with the new system they will be able to measure the change we make in these children’s lives and he continues “The improvements that are made possible by Rojo’s tailor-made software package will save many (street) children’s lives and help offer them much better futures”.
For us, this project holds a special place as since the beginning of Rojo our social responsibility mainly focused on helping children in need and providing them with the chance to shine. The managing partner of Rojo, Roberto Viana speaks for us all when he says “We are incredibly happy to be able to help the volunteers working at Amani and of course, the children in need in Tanzania. We see this as a steppingstone and hope to offer this as a white label solution to more charities”.
You can learn more about the activities of Amani Kids here.