This month, we are excited to be increasing our efficiency and social impact with our new and improved beneficiary ID scanning system at our sites! For the past nine months, we have been providing free SHOFCO ID cards to beneficiaries who use any or all of our services. The IDs feature a picture of the individual, along with a bar code that allows individuals to “Check-in” at any of our programs. Prior to developing this system, a beneficiary at our water tower had their information kept in paper records, separate from the records kept at our clinic, library, cyber café, economic empowerment groups, or in any other program within SHOFCO.
Our librarian, David, scans in community members when they visit our library
For the past nine months, our Metrics & Evaluation team has been working tirelessly to register all of our many program users – anybody who participates in our clinic, water tower, youth programs, Group Savings and Loans programs, and, of course, The Kibera School for Girls. To date, we’ve registered over 6,000 beneficiaries and their roughly 24,000 family members, with more being registered every day.
We’ve asked our beneficiaries questions ranging from how old they were when they had their first child to who in their family has the most control over education decisions for their children, and we will ask them again in later years to see how their living conditions and social norms have changed through use of each of our programs. By registering our beneficiaries, we’re able to determine important, detailed demographic information of the population we work with – their ages, genders, level of education, income, employment status, and more – and determine how our programs make a positive impact on these important factors in our beneficiaries’ lives. Registration will also make our service more accessible and efficient for our beneficiaries, saving them time and providing them with a better quality, individually tailored service.
Today, a woman arrives at our water tower to purchase safe drinking water from our SHOFCO Clean Water Kiosk and has her new SHOFCO ID card scanned. If she uses our health clinic to receive treatment for an illness, an electronic record from her visit will be made. If she then visits our Community Programs and joins our Economic Empowerment program in a Group Savings and Loans (GS&L) group, she will sign in using her SHOFCO ID . Every time she returns to the clinic for a check-up or attends a GS&L meeting or gets clean water from our water tower, an electronic record of her visit will be made.
In our new system, every time she scans in, her records are pushed directly into our new Salesforce platform. This online database, which we’ve built with the team from Vera Solutions, helps us streamline our daily operations while providing us with in-depth data that will allow us to evaluate our programs’ short, medium, and long-term impact and efficiency.
John Paul, left, and Johnson, right, have spearheaded the registration process over the past 6 months.
Over time, we can use this data – collected across 1000s of beneficiaries – to improve the services we provide to the Kibera community. Along with the community input and support that has always dictated how, when, and where we develop our programs, this data can be a vital resource that informs how we should adapt or expand our programs to better serve the people of Kibera.