It is the magic pill for NGOs in Conflict-Zones and in general

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I have recently been talking to people in my network who are still working in conflict zones and are delivering humanitarian aid or are working for development organizations such as USAID and IRC and such.

I mostly hear the management talking about DEVELOPING their own web and database applications and my years of experience with organization of that nature has thought me one thing for sure. You do NOT need custom-made software for a number of reasons including the following ones.

Uncertainty

I was working with RAPD-S, a $125 million, a five-year-long project in four southern provinces of Afghanistan from 2015 all the way to 2017. There were numerous external factors that would change the direction of the project overnight, and there was almost nothing we could do but adapt to the new normal and proceed, namely the security challenge.

We would be forced to shut down our services in a district in a matter of hours and that had its effects on our web, database, and reporting applications. Had we had our own custom-made applications, we would have slowed down significantly.

However, it was the use of Saas platforms such as Quickbase and Appein that enabled us to adapt, change, deploy and keep on delivering services.

Limited Budget

The NGOs operate solely on donated funds, and the challenge NGOs face is how much of a donated dollar are they actually able to push to the beneficiaries of their services, for example, IRC states that they deliver 87 cents of a USD to their beneficiaries.

IRC Data Click Here

Now imagine, organizations such as IRC were investing in their custom-made database and web applications, they would have wasted a great amount of the donated dollar on things that do not really add value to the lives of their beneficiaries, but are merely medium to deliver their services that can be replaced by a more robust and lesser expensive solution.

Lack of Infrastructure

A vast majority of the humanitarian and development organizations that operate on donations deliver services in third-world countries and a great number of them work in conflict zones.

If there is one thing we know about environments such as that is that, we have very limited access to highly skilled labor, and we certainly lack the advanced and efficient infrastructure required to support our complex software system.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

What platforms such as Saas and Low/ No Code bring to the table is the absence of such infrastructures and 99.999% availability. The NGOs do not need to bother about the whereabouts of the underlying infrastructure. Not only that but also, these Saas platforms do not require very highly skilled labor, they are made easily and are way less complicated compared to the in-house, custom-made software solutions.

Conclusion

There are numerous reasons why organizations should consider Saas and Low/ No code platforms before they dive in and hire their in-house software development teams.

We here at RapidIteration do just that, our team has hands-on experience of decades of working in conflict zones and we have seen what worked and what was a catastrophic failure. Our team would be glad to assist you in that regard.

To book your free consulting session please follow the link and we will be glad to assist you with a tailor-made solution for your organizational needs. Book Your Free Session