4 years down the line

Unlimited funding is a guarantee of success for any organisation, right? Wrong. In the course of  8 years working with community-based organisations in developing countries such as India, Jordan and Uganda we learned that resources need to be coupled with the capacity to strategically and sustainably invest them.

That is why, in September of 2010, we set off with a group of MBA students from the University of Westminster and a programmer from our strategic partner, Westbrook to Kampala, Uganda. Our mission was to support KCCC, a local clinic that provides free health care for the local community and neighbouring villages. KCCC had many patients and one problem: how to keep track of the data and treatment of all their 5,000 clients.  At that point, all information was managed by using over 10 spread sheets, each managed by a different department in the organisation.

Westminster students had done their preliminary research, and our strategic partner Salesforce.com had kindly donated licenses for their data management system, to be implemented at KCCC. The group had no more than 2 weeks working with the clinic and programmers to implement the system and train users. Quite a challenge.

But one that was happily overcome. By the end of those 2 weeks, KCCC had a new system implemented, with the information about patients, community workers and drugs already input, not to mention employees capable of using the system to increase efficiency in their tasks.  This included releasing four members of staff from data collection and management work to other areas, capacity building and building capacity!

The project was so successful that KCCC’s employee responsible to support the system implementation was invited by Salesforce.com to their annual conference in California, as a guest speaker reporting his experience.

Almost 4 years after the project, The Great Generation’s team spotted the lab employees still using the system in their everyday work life! And we are now preparing for the next projects that will build on this successful experience, and take KCCC one step closer to their long term plans.