Invention and Technological Ideas Development Organization (ITIDO) is a non-profit organization registered under NGO’s Act of Tanzania with the aim of creating a collaborative environment for inventors to innovate and share ideas and processes with individuals from the academic, non-profit and public sectors. The mission of ITIDO is to encourage, support and promote technological and innovative ideas.

As a part of our objective, which is to promote innovation in Tanzania, we do capacity building to provide skills to innovators. In order to achieve this, we have engaged with partners and initiatives, such as Dimagi and Coded in Country. ITIDO can utilize its local presence and expertise to provide senior and junior programmers to pair with other CIC nodes, creating a collaborative environment the enables effective development and training.

Thus far, we have received a CIC grant to develop CommTrack, a software package (using RapidSMS and JavaRosa) for tracking the status and location of resources in health facilities.

CommTrack Brief Description

CommTrack is a system for tracking the status and location of resources. It maintains a master index of the status and location of resources in a country, easily accessible and updatable by Internet and mobile phone.

While a basic functionality is available via SMS, a complete application running on a mobile phone will be developed using an open source platform known as JavaROSA. It will produce indicators such as the number of status changes per week, the current status of equipment, and warnings or alerts that will help monitor whether the system is in use. It will also support verification functionality (i.e., somebody reports status of resource without knowing current value) to monitor the reliability of the data in the system.

What Has Been Done So Far?

The working prototype is ready and all basic functionality can be demonstrated. You can update the equipment status using SMS, Web and JavaRosa enabled application. The next step it to refine all the code and develop all functionality fully. We expect by end of August 2010 the fully, robust and stable 1.0 version will be available.