Client:
The Norwegian Refugee Council is an independent humanitarian organisation helping people forced to flee their home countries. They work in 31 countries, where they help save lives and rebuild futures. They deliver high-quality aid and provide camp management, food assistance, clean water, shelter, legal aid, and education. In 2017, they assisted a record number of 8.7 million people in need. Around 14,000 humanitarians work with the Norwegian Refugee Council — most of them hired locally to work in the field. NRC acts as an advocate for displaced people and supports the UN and local authorities in humanitarian crises.
Background:
Qualitative data collection and analysis are key to correctly implementing and evaluating aid. EyeSeeTea is contributing to this effort by developing several customized web apps for NRC based on DHIS2. DHIS2 is one of the most used and useful software for health management data, an open source platform developed by the Health Information Systems Program (HISP) and is supported by the University of Oslo’s Department of Informatics. Its initial scope has been systematically expanded to cover other sectors beyond health, such as education, water and sanitation, food security.
In the field, using efficient software is key. We work with NRC to provide an application tailored specifically to community workers’ needs through customizable datasets.
Solution:
The Dataset Configuration Web App allows NRC administrators to create quick and easily customizable datasets through the use of a form wizard. They can be configured according to the needs of each project, aid area, and country. NRC has already configured 400+ datasets. More than 100 of these datasets are currently in use. These customized surveys are later on filled by the local field workers. Later on, this data is used to evaluate the impact of the aid and to efficiently correlate outputs with outcomes. Our other web apps for NRC are Dataset Recording and User Enhancement, which allow users to delete, correct and push new data and a sophisticated management of users, respectively.
Starting from a DHIS2 platform, these applications aim to modify some core and module features of DHIS2, specially from pivot tables webapp, to improve and extend some of its functions. The main objectives are to allow Indicators to be created in a DataSetAttribute basis and to provide a way and an interface to create calculated items in pivot tables by using other fields from the table. We provide a second-tier technical support for the DHIS2 platform and a set of technical developments including enhancement to current pivot/visualisation applications, indicator calculation enhancement and amendments of core functionality for visualisation.
Code:
You can check out our open source code at our GitHub repositories (all of our apps are licensed under GPLv3). Apps are currently under active development and we release frequently new versions:
https://github.com/EyeSeeTea/dataset-configuration-blessed
