NGO-Educate

NGOs around the world, and especially in developing regions such as South Africa, often look to engage with beneficiaries to share and disperse educational material. After the events of Covid 19 in 2020, face-to-face interactions became unfeasible and unsafe, and as a result NGOs had to also move their educational efforts online. Unfortunately, there was no one unified platform that offered a personally branded mobile application (Android), that also allowed them to share various kinds of educational content (Video, Audio, PDF).

The NGO Educate Framework attempts to address this issue. The framework  provides an end-to-end solution that allows non-technically skilled NGOs to easily upload and manage content, and then build a production ready APK (Android file) that can be shared with beneficiaries and only display their content. The framework has four components:

1. Content Manager

2. Backend Service

3. APK Generator

4. Mobile Client

By working with four NGOs located in Cape Town, South Africa, this project followed a staged, user-centered design process. From initial requirements gathering, to initial testing, and final review, we were able to iteratively improve component’s (design and functionality).

After our work, we concluded that there was indeed a need for a simple system that would allow NGO’s to disperse educational content to their beneficiaries through a personally branded app that only showed their content. In addition a solution that allowed the consolidation of different content types. Our framework seems like a simple and intuitive experience that non-technical NGO members would be happy to use or see extended