Several months ago I met up with Don Jorgenson, Development Director for Nuru International. We talked about everything from family to work stuff to the latest movies coming out. He’s a great guy and it was wild to hear about all that Nuru is doing internationally. A few weeks after we met up, Don shared with me this video about what Nuru was doing with phones and google docs. Check it out.

With the introduction of this tech, how much time are you saving monthly?

Approximately 80 hours

Has the data been conclusive (new way vs the paper version)? Any New Trends?

We don’t have enough data to make conclusions yet. But soon!

What was the timeline from idea to implementation?

The timeline has been quite fast. The idea had been tossed around before, but David started working on the concept of a mobile data solution in February. By April, we had selected hardware and software, and trained most of the local Kenyan staff with the use of the phones (email and form submission). We did two months of practice and QA, and we started collecting real data in June

Any tech insights on building supportive mobile websites?
David used Google Sites because his HTML skills are poor. He removed all graphics and backgrounds, and made a webpage with nothing but links to our Google Forms; this worked quite well.

Was it super expensive to rollout?

Hardware and our first few months of data cost $4300. David gets paid $2500/month and spent 2.5 months on the project; about a month of that was searching for the solution and won’t need to be repeated. The other 1.5 months were training and implementation; this should be done by our Kenyan staff in the future. In total, this cost Nuru on the order of $11,000.

This is a great merger of technology, ingenuity and commonly available tools to make the world a better place. Any other nominees for quality humanitarian work harnessing technology? Leave a comment and let me know.

Check out Nuru website here – nuruinternational.org

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