Mumbai, Maharashtra, India | 8th April 2020: Today, many NGO workers like Shyamrao are providing relief materials to countless people at a huge personal risk to their life and health. Numerous business groups have come forward with generous contributions to help India’s poor in every state to help people cope through the lockdown period. NGO management teams who are coordinating these efforts are finding it tough because they can’t physically monitor the relief work and operating at very low team strength.
“At our NGO, we were working with many self-help groups to facilitate employment, education for single women. After the lockdown was announced, we are providing essential grocery items, food, and masks for the people, which we are handing over in door-to-door service. We have been given an app through which we are recording the beneficiary information and their photos as they receive the relief materials. The app also has geo-tagging and time-stamping options. This way our management and donors are assured that their contribution to the Corona cause is reaching the poorest of the poor,” said Shyamrao Vithal, a grass-root worker in Latur district of Maharashtra.
Monitoring the relief work that is being provided is important because, given the virulent nature of this pandemic, it looks like there can be an extended period of lockdown in most parts of the country. In this situation, the most vulnerable sections of the society can survive only on the relief material that the Government and NGOs provide.
Thankfully during times such as this, technology comes to our rescue. In this particular instance, Web platform along with Mobile App created by SoulAce, a specialized CSR firm is aiding many NGOs for Free to plan their relief work in a coordinated manner, even while maintaining social distance.
SoulAce’s application is uniquely poised to help relief organizations to bring in a semblance of order in their work and to plan their relief materials systematically. Remote monitoring by geo-tagging the last mile donor and time stamping their photo helps the organizations to track the NGO ground worker closely to ensure that relief is reaching all those who need it. There is centralised dashboard to track region wise and project wise progress, budget tracking, data analyses apart from various decision making tools built in.
“SoulAce’s Tech Platform is a comprehensive project monitoring platform which was already being used by our CSR Clients and NGOs to track their projects on a centralized dashboard. Once the COVID crisis started, we decided to extend this for free to NGOs working on COVID response as a contribution from our side, where we are hand holding them in the entire process. Apart from the Tech Platform, SoulAce has also been directly working on other aspects of COVID response, on a voluntary basis bringing together its network of Companies, NGOs and District Authorities for medical equipment, and food material and essential kits,” remarked Adarsh Kataruka, Founder of SoulAce Social Venture.
SoulAce is presently giving the application for free to aid in the relief work and is presently being used in many states by more than 50 NGOs for COVID response.
