Kiwi software helps United Nations aid to Gaza
UNITED NATION’S relief workers in Gaza will use software created by a Lower Hutt firm to speed up the delivery of food aid to about a million Palestinian refugees.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency has been using paper forms to collect information on families who may be in need of assistance.
But Harvest Your Data chief executive Stephen Cohn said its app would instead let social workers type information gathered during home visits in Gaza in to tablet computers.
That information could be uploaded over the internet later, when the UN workers were in reach of an internet connection.
Cohn said some refugees had been waiting more than a year for help and it was ‘‘pretty rewarding’’ for the eight-person Petone business to see its software being put to such uses.
Harvest Your Data originally developed its mobile application for market research. Customers have included the Earthquake Commission, which used the app for surveys in Christchurch.
‘‘The way it works is you create any questionnaire on our website and load that on to the app on your mobile device and, from then on, the app handles everything – with the logic built in – so you don’t need an internet connection.’’
The app is designed to gather data from families who may have up to 35 family members. The software checks questions aren’t missed and that the submitted answers are consistent.
Harvest Your Data had
supplied the software agency ‘‘basically at said.
Gaza social worker Amani Mkheimar said in a statement released by the firm that as well as being faster, the app would also make the assessments of Palestinian refugees more transparent.
‘‘The waiting period for beneficiaries to learn the assessment results will be much shorter, which is very important for them,’’ she said.
Cohn said the UN had found his company’s app through an internet search. The project manager running the aid programme was by ‘‘pure coincidence’’ a Kiwi, he said.
‘‘When I started talking to them via Skype, they were sitting with their backs to a window and suddenly ducked. That was when the Israelis had just started bombing them at the beginning of that [2014] war.
‘‘That was partly why I decided to do it essentially at cost.’’ to the UN cost’’, Cohn