The food assistance body of the world’s largest humanitarian organization provides food security and assistance to over 90 million people in 80 countries. In order to distribute food assistance to people in need, the client must register personal information and some biometrics, such as facial geometry and fingerprints, in humanitarian apps, which can then be used throughout the individual’s lifecycle of interactions with the client to verify their identity and allocate aid.

Challenge

Our challenge was to design a solution capable of running on a commercially available smartphone device that would enable the client and their partnering organizations to register as many as 100,000 food assistance beneficiaries in 10 days or fewer.

In parallel to the registration, the client also partners with local retailers in order to leverage their logistics and market knowledge to more effectively distribute food assistance to beneficiaries.

This process involves detailed field assessments of a wide variety of retailer types to understand their fitness for partnering with the client.

This paper-based process involves multiple departments: legal, procurement, logistics, program management, vulnerability assessment management, and can take weeks, if not months, for a retailer to be contracted.

Our challenge was to design a solution that would allow staff and partners to rapidly assess retailers and submit them for contracting within 2 weeks.

Solution

Both the retailer assessment and beneficiary registration processes are complex and must adhere to international regulations. Concentrix Catalyst used our Discovery Process to understand the processes and then distill them down into the key steps to be carried out on mobile.

We worked with departments across the client who do not often work together and helped to negotiate a revised process suitable for mobile that satisfied all the criteria, including legal and regulatory.

Following the creation of the prototypes for both processes, Concentrix Catalyst was involved in a simulation in Kenya where the retailer assessment prototype was successfully tested.

Outcomes

The client was very impressed with the alignment that our process brought to the project. It was an ambitious initiative that required change to be accepted across multiple departments and delivering this process was an achievement in itself. The humanitarian apps prototype testing for the Retailer application was very successful and the application has now been deployed to the field. The Beneficiary application will be completed soon. Both apps will help people in need during crises get their provisions safely and more quickly.

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