KwaMoja / webERP hospital extensions

I am pleased to announce that we have brought our hospital extensions in line with the latest code, and that it is now available for testing. It can be downloaded from my github site at https://github.com/timschofield/KwaMoja/tree/KwaMoja-Medical.

This code by itself can be used in small clinics where it is just necessary to track what treatment a patient has had, and do the financials, or it can be used together with Care2x (http://www.care2x.org).

On installation you should find that you have another module called "Hospitals" installed. 

This module contains all the options for billing patients, dealing with the insurance companies, and reporting on the hospitals activities.

Using these extensions will provide a great help in tightening up a hospitals financial activities, and considerably help to reduce fraud. A brief description of how this works is given below.

Each cashier has a petty cash account that is just for their use, and which can be restricted to just them and a senior accountant/cashier to use. 

The Hospitals module contains options to bill from various hospital departments.

When a patient presents themselves at the cashier for say, the Laboratory, the cashier just has to select the option for "Billing For Laboratory Tests". They will then see a screen for helping them find the patient:

This is the same for whichever billing option the cashier chooses. As can be seen the cashier can search on many different ways, including the name, address, phone number to establish the right patient. Once the patient has been selected the cashier will see the billing screen:

If the link to Care2x is active then all the unbilled laboratory tests for that patient
will be shown, together with the total amount to be paid, so that all the cashier has to do is to collect the cash from the patient, and click on "Make Payment".
If the Care2x link is not activated then the patient should present the cashier with a document to show what Laboratory test they have been prescribed. The cashier then selects this as follows.

When the lab test is selected the price for that test is automatically pulled from the system. This depends on what price list was selected for that patient. Any number of price lists can be setup and selected for the patient. The cashier can select as many tests as needed, and the total amount payable is automatically entered in the "Amount Received" box.

When the cashier clicks on the "Make Payment" button all accounting and stock transactions related to this payment are automatically done using pre determined parameters.

At the end of the shift the cashier prints out a transactions report for their cash account, and the total of that list must agree with the total amount of cash that the cashier has collected. This list together with the cash is then taken to the chief accountant/cashier who verifies that the cash agrees with the report, and then does a transfer of cash from the cashiers account to the main account, which makes the balance of the cashiers account zero, in preparation for their next shift.

The chief accountant, or other authorised person then produces a report of any laboratory tests that were prescribed but have not been billed, and any items shown on this report need to be analysed to see why they have not been billed.

 There are various other reports and configuration options available which there isn't space to go into right now, and I will try to publish another article on these.

KwaMoja version 14.02 is released

 KwaMoja version 14.02

This is a brand new version of KwaMoja with many additional features, and many enhancements from webERP.

There is a completely rewritten installer giving an option of 27 different charts of account donated by contributors from around the world. Users have the choice to upload some demo data, or to go through the entire hand holding procedure to set up a new blank company.

Internal stock requests can now be edited or cancelled on a per line or per request basis.

When making a payment to suppliers, the invoices can be chosen from within the payments screen, and all allocations are performed automatically.

Inventory can now be analysed on an ABC basis, to identify fast/slow moving items. This analysis can be done using different bases, and multiple analyses kept.

KwaMoja has a dashboard that enables multiple views of the status of orders/inventory/banks etc. to be shown on one screen. This is configurable on a per user basis.

There is a new and more intuitive user interface for those using it for whom English is not the first language.

Shipments can now be entered with a start date before today's date thus enabling a more sensible ETA date to be entered.

The code has been simplified and smartened up in line with the coding guidelines.

Numerous bug fixes have been applied.

Form as are now verified at client side, and better error dialogs are shown.

The full change log can be viewed here: https://github.com/timschofield/KwaMoja/blob/release_1402/doc/Change.log

The state of resource planning in African Industry

A proper history of ERP would be beyond the scope of this article so what below is a radical précis of the facts, simplifying occasionally for the sake of brevity.

In the nineteen seventies a new approach to manufacturing systems started to spread outwards from Japan. Generally credited as starting at Toyota where it had evolved over a period of years. This approach had several names JIT (Just In Time), stockless production, and Material requirements planning (MRP).

What was happening was that the capabilities of computers was being utilised to plan the resources being used in manufacturing to dramatically reduce the cost of holding and handling these resources. It became possible to plan exactly what resources were going to be needed and when. Then correct management of the supply chain meant that these resources could be in the right place at exactly the right time. Better planning and efficient use of resources produced better quality finished goods.

This revolutionary approach began to move through western businesses during the eighties with such companies as Hewlett Packard leading the way. Through the eighties and into the nineties most western companies adopted at least some of this new manufacturing philosophy, the most successful at implementing this became the most competitive, and survived the recessions of those years.

Computer software to help this approach was developed, at first in house, and then by ISV's. This was called MRP, then MRP II also CRP (Capacity Requirements Planning) eventually evolving into one integrated solution ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning).

Like most new market places there was an initial explosion in the eighties of many vendors supplying this software, followed up as the market matured in the nineties by a consolidation into a small number of vendors.

Then came the open source revolution of the new century, when there was again an explosion of new products onto the market place.

So, first Asian businesses, then American and European businesses adopted this new philosophy their products became highly competitive in the world market. Where did this leave Africa?

I first began to get involved with African businesses in the second half of the last decade and was horrified at just how few companies had adopted this approach to manufacturing. Too often the approach was "Labour is cheap, if we have a problem we throw more cheap labour at it". This approach comes with many problems. Most obviously quality falls when you employ cheap temporary labour, but there is also the social aspect of this. The small amount of planning that seemed to be done was done by hand or spreadsheet. The resource planning revolution had not reached Africa.

Poor control of resources also meant that businesses were losing a great amount of stock through theft. This had a double affect on the business, there was the loss of money that had to be used to replenish the stock, but also the failure to meet customer orders was costing them dearly.

This meant that African goods just couldn't compete with western companies that used sophisticated tools to keep quality high, and costs low.

It would be nice to say that African business owners took to ERP very quickly, but as it was in the early days in the west it was a struggle, but more and more businesses are now seeing the benefits of good planning.

The only software that has been available to African businesses has been produced in the west. This was one of our motivations in producing KwaMoja. We wanted to produce some thing that would benefit African businesses, and something that was produced in Africa, and something that African consultants can sell services around.

We are happy to announce that a new version of KwaMoja is ready and hitting the mirrors already. This is version 14.02 and you can download this version from here.

Comments on "ICT Aid projects in Africa - Why so many failures?"

I got a lot of comments on this article, but the article was printed in many places, and so the comments were dotted around. I thought it might be useful to bring them together in one place.

On the Human Resources Africa Group Steve Oloo said:
"May be its because the Projects lacked good visibility study. another thing that happens in Africa and in my case I can speak of Kenya. you find that the Government can change policies and tax in a day thus making the equipments outsourced to be expensive than initially planned hence going for cheaper options that are generally expensive... another thing that happens is that the level of poverty in Africa is too much that the creativity is diverted in the line of vandalism of ICT projects...one example is the fiber-optics which is the best invention and thought to be useful to ICT only but people in Africa vandalize the just to make illuminating flowers structures to sell to the public thus hindering its usefulness...
the right personnel is also a problem since Africa , Kenya in particular see papers rather than what you can do.... Lastly the level of corruption in Africa is so deep that even a good project for all humanity must be bribed so as to be implemented..making the initial cost be peanuts compared to the cost of implementation...."

On Africa - All Things Business Phil Johnny said:
"ICT projects failure in Africa is largely due to [ LACK of will power, dedication, commitment & passion] to ensure that people in Africa benefit from Information & Communication technology which they rightly deserve. Conflict & Corruption have been plaging the continent for years. There is no doubt tons of investment opportunities in Africa but without the right people (Authorities) in the corridors of power, things could easily get out of control and no one will be seen to account for the mess. Moreover, when the willingness and readiness to make needed sacrifices is not in the hearts of the leaders, all else fails. Therefore, a COMPLETE & GENUINE CHANGE OF ATTITUDE is absolutely necessary."

 On Accra Business Club - Africa | Ghana | Networking Andrew Brookes said:
"Tim great piece - very astute.
One obvious resource for ICT in Africa and other developing countries (India)is LInux and other free source software; but because the general ethos is that because people (e.g Ricard Stallman and GNU) don't charge there is next to no money to support projects. Microsoft on the other hand has a better business model ,so what it decides to get behind usually doesn't fail
Secondly it seems to me there is no thought or co-ordination by say the Ghana Government to take the data it has on official registered NGO's concerned with ICT and link activities together.
As you say some projects are maybe vague. What about this project i've been working on- You take the school wiki download a quality E-encyclodpedia of 6000 articles, 26 million words and 50,000 images which has been checked and based on the UK curriculum( http://schools-wikipedia.org) you enhance it with a search function and work out how say 10 or more children would be able to use it with a set up of server/client.
see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkCjzlVQ6_g&feature=youtu.be
There would be potential to "personalize" the system if scholars and historians contributed since the E-Encyclopedia is basically a bunch of web pages that can easily be edited. Since the set up involves a web server there is the capacity to use it to teach children construction of web pages, CSS style sheets and computer languages such as PHP.
I have had a previous meeting with the ICT co-ordinator of the Ministry of Education in Accra, and I bet if I was sitting opposite him now and put the above to him I wouldn't be surprised if he could even comprehend the possible value of such a project.
Microsoft on the other hand has just appointed Otema Yirenkyi in Ghana; what I can imagine is if Microsoft comes and says "we have the money, the ideas etc so you don't have to do much " then its easy for those with lack of imagination, vision and leadership to just go along with it.
Personally I am not against Microsoft and admire their business model ; also there is potential for joint projects such as LInux servers and Windows clients "  
I replied:
"I agree fully with you Andrew. I wrote an article here http://weberpafrica.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/africa-and-open-source-software.html on the subject of why African governments should look to open source as a way of building a local IT industry.
I do believe that if these governments invested the money they spent on foreign IT products and services in a local open sourced based IT industry everybody except the multinationals would gain,
I have set out in that article how I envisioned this working.
Very much like your wikipedia for schools. Have you tried the Ministry for Education? I am sure you are correct in what you would expect from them. I have previously come across the "if it's not American and expensive how can it be any good" philosophy in Govt departments. There are potentially donor organisations that could help. "
Andrew Brookes commented:
"cheers Tim
from the perspective of an Educational resource which could be extended , I can not at the moment imagine a better one than the school wiki with search facility.When you say there are potentially donor organisations that could help, could you elaborate a little on who they may be and how I can contact them?
One problem I have is that I went through quite a few hoops to get an NGO registered in Ghana but don't have anything registered in the UK. I did try to get support in the U.K but the feedback is " we don't help organizations or charities unless they are UK registered"!
I am not keen to bang my head against a brick dealing with UK possible EU bureaucracy to be honest"
And I replied: 
"Getting money for an African NGO or other charitable organisation directly from western countries is very hard. Too much money vanished down that hole in the past. Going through a UK/EU based organisation provides any donor with some legal recourse if funds go missing.
However there are UK based organisations that already have this link between UK and Africa in place. One such that immediately springs to mind for your project is http://www.africaeducationaltrust.org which is UK based but works in Africa. There are others than could possibly help.
I have some other contacts that could possibly help. Contact me on tim.schofield1960@gmail.com if you would like us to try and work together to get this moving" 

On Windhoek Business Club - Namibia Ashraf Bharmal said:
"Wrong projects for wrong reasons. There are cases of spectacular successes too but few and far apart."
and Salehe Khatibu replied: 
"poor management of them "
and I said:
"@Ashraf Agreed. I feel that many donor organisations get this balance wrong because of a lack of local knowledge. A person or group is sent to Africa to evaluate the project. They stay in a luxury tourist hotel, are entertained by local people eager to say whatever they think is needed to be said to get the money flowing. None of this is wrong, but means that they don't get a clear view of what is needed and the people locally will not always tell them for fear that the project will not go ahead. 
@Salehe Very true. Project management skills are some of the hardest to learn, rarest, but least appreciated skills going. Bad leadership will cause failure whatever else happens"

On Dar es Salaam Business Club - Tanzania Catherine Mkude said:
"Dear all, My name is Catherine G. Mkude and I am a PhD researcher at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany working on a framework for e-government systems design for developing countries. In my research, I am investigating e-government strategies, programmes and projects (applications, infrastructures, comprehensive solutions, etc.) in developed and in developing countries. In doing so, I want to determine how developing countries can leverage from the more successful e-government endeavours in developed countries.
I am currently in a stage of collecting information on experiences, practices and solutions in 5 domains of e-government implementation in developed and developing countries. These domains are (1) electronic public services, (2) electronic participation, (3) application of information and communication technologies (ICT) in policy making processes, (4) e-government infrastructure and, (5) evaluation and sustainability of e-government.
Therefore I would like to kindly ask you to participate in a survey, which investigates these domains through separate questionnaires. I would highly appreciate if you could fill in one (or even more) of the below questionnaires. The responses for the questionnaires are entirely confidential and anonymous.
The following links direct you to the respective questionnaire per domain. The approximated time to fill in a questionnaire is also indicated below. Please choose the link(s) of the domain(s) you feel most comfortable to answer.

1. Domain electronic public services: http://cmkude.limequery.com/index.php/983413/lang-en. Approximate time is 40 minutes.
2. Domain electronic participation: http://cmkude.limequery.com/index.php/388819/lang-en. Approximate time is 40 minutes.
3.  Domain ICT in policy making: http://cmkude.limequery.com/index.php/776413/lang-en. Approximate time is 35 minutes.
4. Domain e-government infrastructure: http://cmkude.limequery.com/index.php/375388/lang-en. Approximate time is 30 minutes.
5. Domain e-government evaluation and sustainability: http://cmkude.limequery.com/index.php/582399/lang-en. Approximate time is 30 minutes.
   

In advance I appreciate and thank you for your time and contributions. If you are aware of someone who I can ask to fill in either of the questionnaires, please let me know by email and I will invite them. Thank you and kind regards,  Catherine G. Mkude. "
Ashraf Bharmal said:
"Hope you paper will produce some positive results. Best wishes and Good luck"
Leticia Slame said:
"Hello Tim, it quiet interesting that has been my question why ICT Project fail to successed and if they successed it wont last long and most of the people have negative response, I will be glad if I get the reasons. "
and Ashraf Bharmal said:
"My Take:
1. Politically expeditious projects
2 Poor planning
3 FEEDS and Feasibilities , Colorfully printed, beautifully bound and presented, full of sound and fury in which affected sectors, people have no say.
4. Foreign contractors, not involving local entities in the project from the beginning who would gain hand on experience of the project, instead of six week orientation seminars at the end of the completed projects
5. Lack of post project planning of operating, maintaining."

On KwaMoja - Open Source ERP for Africa Nicholas Mmasi said:
"-Too many unfair side deals...people want to spend money and write a good report
- Demotivated staff ,less communication and unclear benefit of the system to the operating staff.
- No plan for sustainability right from the beginning,so once the donor pulls out the things end up there.
-Unrealistic requirements and system rationale... "
and I replied
"Hi Nicholas,
"-Too many unfair side deals...people want to spend money and write a good report "
I agree, I have seen too many "stage managed" visits by donors to sites where people at the sites have been given money to back up a false report.
"- Demotivated staff ,less communication and unclear benefit of the system to the operating staff. "
This is what I meant by lack of good project management. It is the job of the project management to motivate and communicate with staff.
"- No plan for sustainability right from the beginning,so once the donor pulls out the things end up there. "
Excellent point. Sustainability is some thing I should have gone into greater length about in the article. Who maintains once the donor leaves. Where does the financing of that support come from? "
Nicholas said:
"Hi Tim, Donors also have bad policies that are not applicable in Africa.I have been going around trying to see why so many projects fails eve before donors pulls out.
Almost all project are in pilot mode/Nursery and never get out of the lab.Similar scenarios are readily available and visible in areas of agriculture(farming technology and techniques), small scale industries, bio-gas,ICT, healthy ,and many more....
I normally find them in exhibitions only.... "
and I replied:
"Hi Nicholas, sadly you are right, despite most involved having the best intentions. I don't believe that it is necessary though, with some changes in policy and outlook a much higher percentage will succeed. There will always be failures but the failure rate shouldn't be this low. Tim "

On Information and Technology Lisa Schnellinger said:
"Excellent points. From my experience, I think they are often true of all types of development projects, in all regions. "

On Monrovia Business Club - Africa | Liberia | Networking Deodatus Shayo said:
 "Lack of ownership "

On Harare Business Club - Zimbabwe | Southern Africa Viola Marufu said:
"Tim, you have an interesting article. Interesting that you list your perspective as statements made from observations of certain African projects which does not necessarily implying that all projects are run like this. However, you should note that the major reason why some donors want local community members to staff and manage projects, rather than outsiders is because the locals know their community better and thats another way of empowering the community. Furthermore, it does not justify the expense of getting an outsider, so to speak, than getting an equally qualified local staff member.
You also say that ICT projects are a newer idea in Africa than in the west and there is limited number of qualified local project managers available. Thats not necessarily true. ICT projects are welcome and expanding in Africa. The current development is the spread of ICT effectively in rural communities and schools. In most areas the major setback is electrification. They are more and more qualified business people, educationists, economists and ordinary people who have well advanced ICT skills. So it is not necessarily an issue of skill but they are other factors influencing this. You are mixing points here.Furthermore if jobs are advertised, the right candidates apply for the job.
Then you say project employees are more interested in perpetuating the project than completing it, they prolong the project for personal interest etc. That is true where the project itself is not well managed. There is always need for an independent Monitoring and Evaluation exercise. They are also independent auditors.
A project that is really interested in benefiting the country in which its operating in will not wait to get a report on their desk. They will also put in measures to ensure all is well. This would be true no matter where the project runs. Whether its in Africa or the West, there is always need for accountability. "
I replied:
"Hi Viola, Thanks for your interesting comments. Firstly I should make clear that I am not nor have I ever been part of a donor organisation. I write from the perspective of someone who has either worked in, or observed many projects.
"Interesting that you list your perspective as statements made from observations of certain African projects which does not necessarily implying that all projects are run like this" - I agree, I tried to make the point I was writing from personal experience only, and was trying to answer why it appeared to me the failure rate was higher than normal in donor funded ICT projects. There is a high failure rate in all ICT projects.The UK NHS IT project is one of the most high profile failures.
"However, you should note that the major reason why some donors want local community members to staff and manage projects, rather than outsiders is because the locals know their community better and thats another way of empowering the community. Furthermore, it does not justify the expense of getting an outsider, so to speak, than getting an equally qualified local staff member. " - obviously it makes sense to employ local staff, my company always has, it keeps money within the local community. However my experience of projects where only local staff work has not been good, for reasons I said. It requires a balance that few projects actually have.
"You also say that ICT projects are a newer idea in Africa than in the west and there is limited number of qualified local project managers available. Thats not necessarily true. ICT projects are welcome and expanding in Africa. The current development is the spread of ICT effectively in rural communities and schools. In most areas the major setback is electrification. They are more and more qualified business people, educationists, economists and ordinary people who have well advanced ICT skills. So it is not necessarily an issue of skill but they are other factors influencing this. You are mixing points here.Furthermore if jobs are advertised, the right candidates apply for the job. " - Well again I can only comment from my own experience. Recruiting qualified local staff has always been a problem. I have regularly trawled the universities, and advertised extensively. I am not saying that there are not capable African staff, just that either they are either in private industry, or moved to the west. I have also seen many projects run by project managers with little or no training in project management. I tried in the article to understand why this is. Project management skills are very different from ICT skills.
"Then you say project employees are more interested in perpetuating the project than completing it, they prolong the project for personal interest etc. That is true where the project itself is not well managed. There is always need for an independent Monitoring and Evaluation exercise. They are also independent auditors. " - That is the point I was trying to make. It is human nature to make the projects last when you are earning money from it. The fault lies in the agencies not managing and monitoring the projects.
"A project that is really interested in benefiting the country in which its operating in will not wait to get a report on their desk. They will also put in measures to ensure all is well. This would be true no matter where the project runs. Whether its in Africa or the West, there is always need for accountability. " - Agreed, as I said at the start the only reason I wrote about Africa was that was where my experience was. "

As you can see, lots of very interesting comments came from this discussion on top of the comments on the article itself.

Sustainability and Corruption in donor funded projects.

I wrote this article a couple of days ago and it attracted a lot of comments. Many of the comments focused on these two issues which I didn't go into in much detail, but they are very important to donor funded ICT projects.

These are somewhat controversial subjects so again I will keep from naming specifics.

Any donor funded project should be sustainable. That is it should continue to function when the donor leaves. Sounds obvious I know, but most people would be amazed at just how few do carry on working. Anybody who has like me, worked and traveled extensively in Africa will be able to recount stories of when this has failed. Here are just a few of mine:

• Water pumps that cannot be maintained when they break down because there are no spare parts, no money or means to get them, nobody trained to fit them if they were available. 
• Fields full of farm machinery (Tractors, Canadian sized combine harvesters etc) rotting away. Why? No spare parts, and nobody trained to maintain them.
• I once visited a large hospital in East Africa which had a modern but non-functioning CT scanner. Again the reason given for its lack of functionality was that it had broken down and nobody could repair it. The hospital was losing considerable income from its not working. This income could easily have paid for a maintenance contract but nobody had arranged it. Lives were being lost in that area of East Africa because the only hospital with a CT scanner had no plan to maintain the scanner once it broke down. The hospital director told me that eventually somebody would donate a new one and the old one would be thrown away.

I am not finger pointing here, this is a story you will hear throughout Africa. In order for projects to be sustainable they have to generate some income, and that income has to be put back into the project in order to provide for the maintenance. For instance I saw a very good scheme in rural Tanzania where the donors had paid for a water pipeline bringing fresh water from a mountain spring many miles away. The local towns people were charged a few shillings (one shilling equals 0.00037 British pounds at current exchange rate) for the water. This money was used to pay local towns people to maintain the pipeline. The money stayed within the local community, and the water continues to flow to this day. Why can't a similar model be used for the above mentioned pumps?

I have seen projects providing hospitals with software. The hospitals were led to believe that the software was free, so no provision was made to support the system once it was installed. When bugs were found in the system there was nobody to fix them, and the software fell into misuse. However this software made the hospitals more efficient, improved their income, that income should have been used to fund local support for that software.

This is one of the reasons why billions of dollars in aid money floods into Africa but things never get better for its citizens.

The other reason is the corruption that follows these projects. I have over the years had conversations with people who have been found to have taken money from projects.  The common theme is always that they do not see it as stealing, or as something wrong. The best analogy I have is that aid money is seen like a river flowing down the mountain, and if you divert a little to irrigate your own field, then the water doesn't stop flowing, and you get a better harvest. The flaw with this argument is that the supply of money is finite and the river does stop flowing.

The best solution I have for this is closer and more rigorous scrutiny of the project by onsite managers who are appointed by the project donors to supervise the use of the money. Just the same as would be done with any commercial company when a budget is allocated to a project.

International aid is not working, but it can. It needs a change of attitude from both the donors and the receivers of the aid.

ICT Aid projects in Africa - Why so many failures?

Before I start this article let me make a couple of statements:

Firstly my experience of donor funded ICT projects is limited to Africa, so by necessity any anecdotes in this article refer to projects in Africa. This isn't meant to indicate that any of the points I make are special to the continent of Africa, and are quite probably true of similar aid projects throughout the rest of the world.

Secondly I will mention no names of people, or institutions. This is an article about what I perceive as issues in many of the projects I have witnessed, either as an observer or as a participant, and is not intended as an indictment of any person, or institution.

Failure of ICT projects is not an uncommon thing. Most statistics seem to show a failure rate of between 50% and 70%. So Africa is not on its own in having these failures. However from my observations I have noticed specific areas in donor funded projects that seem to make these projects more liable to failure:

• "We are a donor funded organisation so we shouldn't use for-profit companies". I have heard this a lot from the donor organisations. This means that they use charitable or religious organisations in order to do the ICT work. This means that local skilled people who happen to work in the commercial sector will not be able to participate in the project. For-profit companies tend to have a better understanding of the importance of meeting deadlines, and they have a reputation to keep up, which means that a successful completion of the project is to their advantage. Non-profit organisations tend to react more slowly and worry less about deadlines. This is a curious decision from the donor organisations as they are happy to hand over money to Toyota for their vehicles, Microsoft/Apple/Dell etc for IT products etc. but when it comes to the most important aspect of the project they limit themselves to the non-profits.
• "The project should be staffed and managed by local people, and not by outsiders". This is a laudable intention, but does it make sense in this sort of project? As pointed out in the above point many of the quality project manager staff will be in the private industry. Also the fact that ICT projects are a newer idea in Africa than in the west, there is a limited number of qualified local project managers available.
• Project employees are more interested in perpetuating the project than completing it. Donor funded projects generally pay much better in local terms than other employers. As the project is run by a local project manager, with local staff, then the major interest of these people is to make sure that the money continues to flow, rather than in getting the project completed. In fact, completing the project often goes against their personal interests. I know of several projects where the donors are taken on periodic "stage managed" tours to show that the work is really being done.
• Projects encourage "cronyism". Too often have I seen projects staffed by the family and relations of the senior members of the non-profit institution charged with the running of the project. I even know of one project that is supposed to be writing software that doesn't employ a programmer as part of it's large staff.

• Project aims are often too vague. I know of projects where the aim is to do something vague, such as "design and implement software for schools". Project aims should be specific, and the time scale should be set down at the start. 

My experience shows that projects should:

1. Be managed by an external person employed by the donor organisation charged with meeting targets.
2. Use the best resources available to them regardless of whether they are non-profit or for-profit.
3. Set definite targets at the start, both in timescale and project goals. The project manager should be the person held accountable.
4. Donor organisations should be firmer in their dealings on the ground. Too often I see donor organisations that take a far too "charitable" view of bad work. The project should be run as a commercial project. The original donors of the money deserve nothing less.

These thoughts are based on many years of watching the failings of such projects in Africa. Donor organisations need a radical change in how they view such projects.

Not all projects fail, there have been some outstanding successes but the failure rate is way too high.

Project Mtuha on android.

Am very happy to announce that an android client for Project Mtuha our new open sourced health information system for Africa is being developed. Here is a preview of this client working on android device:

This fantastic app is being developed by Firas Ataya, Firas Tanan, Ammar Aranjy and Mostafa Natafji of the University of Damascus in Syria. We hope to have some very exciting news related to this project very soon.

Stay tuned!!

Announcing Project Mtuha

I blogged recently about a plan to produce an application based on merging +KwaMoja with Care2x, and I thought it was time to update on progress. Currently the project is called Mtuha.

We have been working on the interface, Registration, Admissions, and Billing modules, but to continue much further with the project we require some form of sponsorship to make it happen. Please let me know if you have any ideas for this.

The interface now looks like this:

The icons along the top left of the toolbar represent different security tokens that the user will have in their login. For information about the security tokens used in KwaMoja see this blog post here. 
 
Holding the mouse over one of these icons brings down a menu containing those options allowed for that security token.

Clicking on any of these options loads up that script in the browser.

We have created a minimal framework that enables forms to be designed, and submitted. Also all forms can be edited, and each element in a form can be made mandatory, and it's visibility can be toggled on and off. This can be used for all forms, and converting the current forms in KwaMoja and Care2x to this framework is very easy.

The registration form contains many elements, a few of which can be seen below, but any of these can be hidden, or added, made mandatory, or optional.

There is a stock type of "Registration Items", and any items set up with this category will appear as options at the bottom of the registration screen:

On completion of the registration, the above appears, and any options that user is entitled to perform are shown on the right. Clicking on print, just prints the patient detail label. Mtuha can be setup to use the bar code, so that when the bar code is scanned by a mobile device (phone etc.) you can be taken to a chosen place in Mtuha for that patient.
There is a new patient search facility, which is the same as used throughout Mtuha when a patient number needs to be found. When you start to type in any of the search fields, the list of possible patients automatically updates. At the far right of each patient details there is a small icon. Clicking that icon will bring up a list of options that the particular user can choose to perform on that patient record.

This particular user can only modify the registration details, or admit the patient. If the user was a cashier then they would see options to bill the patient.

Clicking to admit the patient takes you to the admissions form shown here.


Like the registration form it is fully customisable, and all fields can be made optional/mandatory, or be hidden/shown.


As with the registration form, there is a stock type called Admission. Any items setup with this stock type will appear at the bottom of the admissions form. You can select one or many of these billable items, just as with registration.

If the user then logs in as a cashier, and searches for a patient they are then presented with an option to bill the patient, rather than previously seeing the options to register and admit. Selecting that option brings up this screen, showing any unpaid items for that patient.


Clicking on the button prints a bill for this patient. However it also does a lot more. If any of the items are physical stock items then the required stock movements are processed, together with all related General Ledger transactions. Each cashier has a separate cash account set up for them, and processing this bill will debit that account, and credit the profit and loss account with the sale. At the end of their shift there is a report that should be run by the cashier detailing all the cash they should have received. This report is checked against the physical amount of money the cashier has, and is then passed on to the accounts department.

As I said at the beginning of this article, what we really require now is funding to hire more African developers, and pay for my time.

Help required!!

I have had a plan bubbling away for sometime to take care2x and KwaMoja and merge them together as one complete integrated package. I have written before about how KwaMoja and Care2x have been used in African hospitals, using the KwaMoja api to communicate between the two applications. Now my idea is to create a single open sourced application with a unified interface and a single login that can be rolled out across hospitals all over the continent.

However this requires resources which as ever are in short supply. To get good African programmers who can work full time on this project requires money.

My idea to raise this is to start a Kickstarter project to generate the funding. However I need some help, as a lot of this stuff requires marketing skills that I do not possess. For instance they say a promotional video is more or less essential to a successful project, but I do not have the first idea of how to create one.

There is no money to pay for these services up front, but if someone wants to volunteer (remember that KwaMoja and Care2x have been written by volunteers down the years) I could look to recompensing them later if and when the project gets funded, as a promotional video could be useful in pushing the final software to hospitals. Obviously anybody helping would also gain a lot of publicity for their skills.

If anyone is interested in helping this in any way, then please send me an email on tim.schofield1960@gmail.com.

Thanks in advance!!

Africa and Open Source software

Africa is the most under represented continent when it comes to contributing to open source projects, yet it stands to gain the most of any continent from it. This seems so sad to me.

Why is this so?

There is a perception with many African developers I have met that Open Source is something done by rich western volunteers, in order to benefit people like themselves. There is a tendency to mix it up with the work of Save the children fund, or Oxfam. I have heard the following said many times: "I am an African I can't afford to be a volunteer". It is viewed as a resource to be taken from, but not to give back to.

This is not to say there are no African open source developers, just far fewer than there should be given the wealth of talent on the African continent.

Why should Africans should participate fully Open Source? 

There are two very obvious reasons why individuals can gain from fully participating in open source projects

Firstly by interacting with other programmers it is possible to increase your skill set in ways that would otherwise be impossible. Many of the worlds best programmers are involved in open source projects and are happy to mentor those who are new.

Secondly by contributing to open source projects you enhance your reputation globally. Most if not all the worlds big software companies monitor open source projects looking for talented programmers. In what other way could a student at an African university bring their talents to the attention of the likes of Google or Facebook? Open source show cases your skills.

Proposal to build an African software industry

So much for how contributing to open source can help individuals progress, but what about on a country level? Every year African countries spend millions of dollars on software licenses, almost all, if not all of this money is paid to western companies and none of this money ends up in the African economy. This is despite the fact that all the software necessary is available through open source. So my proposal is this:

I will use Uganda as my example here but this applies equally to any African country.

I propose that the largest university in Uganda (Makerere University) would create a Linux Distribution, based on one of the big distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, Suse or Fedora. This would be branded for Uganda, and include any applications specific to Uganda, together with any local language translations. This distribution would be maintained by the university and would be used as the basis for their teaching, and funded by the government with money that would otherwise have gone abroad. It would be an excellent resource for all areas that are taught in the computer science department. Creating this is not a huge task as there is a large amount of documentation on this subject to be found on the web.

The distribution would contain all the applications needed, such as LibreOffice for word processing and spreadsheets, Firefox for web browsing etc.

The government would commit to moving all their computers to this distribution. If the city of Munich in Germany can achieve this I see no reason why Kampala can't.

The contracts to support the government departments would then be handed out to local support companies, who would have been trained in the distribution at the university. Thus the money instead of going to large American multinationals would stay in Uganda and would circulate within the Ugandan economy, making a sustainable Ugandan IT industry.

Private industry would see the increase in skills with Linux, and the consequent decrease in the skill levels in other operating systems. They would start to take the pragmatic decision to move to this Linux distribution.

We have seen recently how the big American corporations have been "encouraged" to give the security services back doors into their operating systems, allowing the likes of the NSA to view what is on the computers of anybody in the world using their operating systems. This would include (in theory) any member of the Ugandan government. Using a Ugandan operating system built in Uganda, with the code open to view would stop this happening.

So there it is, a simple recipe for creating a sustainable IT industry within Africa, keeping the money in Africa, and potentially exporting IT to the rest of the world, instead of constantly leaking the money out of the Africa. All of this could be achieved with the technology available now. All it takes the will in the government to make it happen. Lets put pressure on them to start making it happen today!