Move to Digital
The most important reason for our client organization Young Africa (YA) to participate into the SAP Social Sabbatical program is that they need to ‘Move to Digital’ as soon as possible to support their running projects and growth ambitions to reach 500,000 students with their vocational, entrepreneurship and life-skills trainings by 2025 (currently they reached 40,000 students).
Over the past 20 years, YA has captured data pertaining to their students manually. This is a cumbersome task and leaves much room for error. In this way, realtime monitoring and evaluation is not possible, and the YA International Hub is now waiting to receive data from their skills centres in excel sheets. If specific information is requested, the skills centres sometimes need to work through piles of paper registration forms manually to find the needed data. We saw an example of this, when we were visiting the Chitungwiza skills centre. During our meeting with the Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) officers, when two interns were working for hours on a manual task to split their student registrations into different age groups.
At this moment YA International is implementing an important 18-month pilot project ‘Skills 2 Live’ in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, with the aim to economically empower at least 1300 young people who are HIV positive or at HIV risk. As this is a big and impactful project, the need for data digitization has become even more urgent.
A centralized digital system which enables ‘near realtime’ transmission of data from all YA project sites, and which validates the incoming data and generates reports, will equip YA management with realtime information for the program office, and enables YA to increase their scope of the organization and thus reach out to more economically, educationally and socially disadvantaged youths in southern Africa.
During the past 4 weeks our subteam (André, Chris and me) has supported Young Africa with their first steps into this ‘Digital Journey’ with the following deliverables:
- An assessment of YA’s current Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) process and a gap analysis on the ‘Skills 2 Live’ M&E setup.
- A technology and database assessment of the open source cloud software ‘KoBo Toolbox’, in relation to YA’s requirements, including its flexibility & scalability and offline capabilities. (KoBo is free for use by humanitarian organisations (https://www.kobotoolbox.org/))
- Defining the design guidelines for building a new digital ‘Student Lifecycle’ system (from registration to graduation).
- Prototype reviewing of the first set of digital forms developed on KoBo, which form the basis for this new ‘Student Lifecycle’ systeem.
- Roadmap to make YA’s ‘Move to digital’ a real success (digital transformation concept).
In the third week of the Social Sabbatical, we facilitated a ‘Design Thinking’ workshop in which all key project stakeholders of the YA International Hub office and YA’s CEO Dorien Beurskens parricipated. The main objective of this session was to gain insight into the needed ‘Process’ and ‘People’ changes, to make this ‘Technology’ transformation a success, and thus to develop a roadmap for the coming weeks & months.
In this session we asked the YA Int. Hub team to ‘stand in the shoes’ of the main end user of the new digital Student Lifecycle system (=M&E officers of the skills centres). The team realized quickly that only developing a ‘new tool’ – without any attention for the necessary Process and People changes related to such a Technology move – will most probably complicate the implementation and adoption (and thus success) of the new digital system.
With our end presentation together with Young Africa on Thursday this week, our 4 weeks of Social Sabbatical has unfortunately come to an end. Nevertheless, YA’s journey towards a digital Monitoring & Evaluation system – based on a complete lifecycle of their students – has just started. In 4 weeks we have been able to support the acceleration of YA’s ‘Move to Digital’ but now it is up to the organization to take it to the next level of a successful implementation. Though, having witnessed their enormous drive and dedication to deliver an amazing job for their beneficiaries, and their real need to digitize their processes, we have no doubt that they will be capable to make this transformation a success!
Good luck Mahara, Wellington, Dolly, Julia, and Dorien with your next moves in this journey, and thank you for your enthusiasm and collaboration. And of course also many thanks to all other YA Int Hub team members for your hospitality, and a big thank you to Raj (and Donna, Choice, Star and Gift 😉) for your great stories and all the inspiring conversations which we had during our lunch breaks…
Maitabasa shamwari dzangu!
