Food Group Community of Practice Report
Some comments to whet your appetite:
“I am very pleased and impressed with how far LMMS has come in the past few years. I wanted to give the team a great credit – LMMS is one of the few innovations that really took hold. ” (Sharon Boyle, WV El Salvador)
“From all the systems I have seen in the humanitarian industry LMMS is the most versatile in terms of features, reporting and use in remote areas where there is no internet or even electricity” (Paul Mwrichia, FPMG)
“On registration, LMMS helps to eliminate double registration, as the cards have unique ID numbers and photo image. The photos also help prevent the struggle for cards which was a common problem previously and during verification. It is very easy to check, sort and analyse beneficiary information, or to disaggregated by age or gender. It is much easier than Excel, which can take hours to format documents and be able to analyze the information. We are also seeing reduction in our expenditure, as we do not have to spend money for stationary, which was pretty high with the manual system. For FFW projects, LMMS allows easy management of beneficiaries work sheet especially when they have different tasks to complete.
On food distribution there are multiple advantages. One is preventing double-dipping. Once a beneficiary scans the card and gets the ration, he is unable to come back to the line and get food for a second time as the card will show that the person has already received food. It also helps in distribution since beneficiaries are grouped by village in LMMS. For example, during the initial phases of the project in Karamoja 2009-2010, we tried to group people from different villages to share food but it was very difficult and would result in conflict as people did not know each other. During the learning event organized in 2010, community representatives advised that sharing groups should be made up of people from the same village. When this was implemented the violence during sharing was eliminated. LMMS allows us to organise the grouping by village hence helps facilitate smooth food distributions. . The biggest advantage is the time. LMMS reduces the time to process beneficiaries significantly. A medium sized distribution now takes about 2-3 hours with LMMS, including all the preparation, uploading of information and such. The time beneficiaries spend at the distribution point is less than 2 hours. Considering the other tasks that they have to do, such as looking for food, water, caring for the family or their farms, such time saving is an important benefit to the beneficiaries especially the women.
LMMS also makes reporting very easy. We had numerous challenges with the paper system. Tallying the beneficiaries list was not an easy task, and it took a long time to complete. Now, after distribution using LMMS you can easily print the final distribution report at the end of the day. A process that would take 2-3 days now can be done in a few hours. It is a big saving on staff time. Staff can invest more time focusing on qualitative issues, such as talking to beneficiaries about nutrition and hygiene issues. LMMS also increases efficiency and accountability. It is very difficult for staff to play around with food commodities or information. When using LMMS you can only distribute what commodity stock you have fed in to the system. Once the stock is completed, the system will not accept any more beneficiaries. In cases where you received less or more commodities there is no need to do cancellation or adjustments afterwards, because it is already taken care of automatically by the system. For FFW, for accountability, the system is able to show the number of days people worked and produce reports which can be shared with the M&E Team. ”
(Walter Chengo, Commodity Manager, WV Uganda)
The full report can be found under the Resources section (http://www.lastmilemobilesolutions.com/resources/). This is a password protected resource for World Vision staff. Please email me if you would like access!
