Why

We have experience in software, hardware, data analysis, measurements and statistics.

Over the past 35 years, we have been involved in manufacturing, marketing, sales and support of products all over the world, mostly from the Silicon Valley.

We know how to initiate, grow and run a sustainable business.

In 1996, in California, we started a company to build some of the devices that made possible the development of the internet as we know it

Lesson learned

This made us aware of the realities of the markets and of the laws of offer and demand. People will only accept changes and services if these provide them with value. One has to look at social services in these terms and focus on the beneficiaries and on the value-added we can provide to them.

In order to deeply understand social challenges all around the world we have traveled extensively, and we visited and analyzed well over 100 sites offering social services, ranging from those rendered by governments to those offered by NGOs.

In 2006, we visited Pakistani Kashmir where people were trying to recover from a devastating earthquake and we lived in a camp with the refugees. There we saw NGOs doing food distribution with people lining up behind large trucks for hours. A lack of proper management of the resources translated into unfair distribution (some getting double dip and others missing out) as well as a tremendous drain on the beneficiaries’ time and energy. Attempts to manage these distributions with paper and pencil didn’t even come close to achieving what was badly needed

Lesson learned

We realized the value of data collection to correctly prioritize and ensure timely and fair delivery of services.

Spending time and talking with many of these refugees made us realize that every one of them is different and needs a personalized service and follow up.

A well-designed tool leveraging a database for the communities would go a long way towards ensuring efficiency and fairness.

In the social arena, we witnessed a lot of engagement by wonderful people, leading to all sorts of results: successful interventions that should be extended and improved, failures that should be analyzed to develop alternatives and some struggling projects that desperately need help and support.

In 2017, in Lebanon, we discovered a wonderful NGO that supports marginalized people in a refugee camp. Their challenge was to link their health care center with their school in order to help whole families instead of individuals: indeed, when a kid has trouble studying the teacher should know if that is caused by his mother being badly sick.

Lesson learned

We developed a tool that would give this NGO the ability to take whole families into account and thus offer what is best suited for each family member.

What

We know that most social interventions would hugely benefit from a deep analysis and updating of their processes along with the deployment of the appropriate tools for case management, data collection and impact analysis.

Indeed, the social institutions that are offering social services typically need to:

Offer customized answers to the diversified needs they encounter among their beneficiaries in a rapidly changing environment

In 2014, in Brazil, we discovered an organization helping young people get professional training through apprenticeship programs

Lesson learned

They quickly realized they needed appropriate software tools to manage the students’ programs and to deploy distance learning. A constantly updated database of the market’s demand for workers as well as the specific characteristics of each student need to be taken into account for an optimized impact on their future.

Measure their impact (not their output but rather the outcome of their intervention) on many different dimensions in order to orient and improve their action

In 2007, in Egypt, we visited a school built by an international NGO who had seen that school-aged girls were not attending school because of a lack of space in the local school. As the teachers all moved to the new school, the old one closed. But the NGO having set quotas in favor of girls in the program, many boys found themselves out of school, idling in the streets

Lesson learned

A proper impact-monitoring tool should have detected early that negative consequence and raised alarms so that actions could be taken to fix that problem.

Report to the people they are accountable to with solid impact analysis based on real data

In 2018, in Colombia, we met an organization that provides professional training and support for micro-entrepreneurs. They needed also to provide proper follow-up to their students after the end of the training and were looking for what value-added they could offer to the ex-alumni.

Lesson learned

They quickly realized that offering advice, training and tools on an online platform was essential for their beneficiaries.

In a World where “Data collection” is all-too-often associated with evil (usually labeled as “Big Data”), we know that properly handled data can be a powerful tool to improve today’s interventions and build prevention mechanisms such as protection and preparedness. We want to make the best ethical use of data to have a positive impact on beneficiaries.

We are committed to build systems that ensure the highest level of protection for the privacy of the people we serve.

In some countries, a person can be detained by the police, brought to jail and locked up while the file gets registered with the judicial authorities. If something goes wrong in that process and the file gets lost, the jail has no choice but to hold on to that person forever

Lesson learned

In 2016, the Bolivian penitentiary system asked for our help with that problem. Our solution is now used to manage all the adult detainees in Bolivia and to ensure that their rights are protected.

In Africa, health services are rare in rural areas. Diagnostics often need to be done by poorly trained people in rough environments

Lesson learned

Providing those health professionals with the right imaging tools and a direct remote access to the right specialists who can receive the images and provide immediate advice can save many lives.

Today in Pakistan, Tuberculosis cases tend to go unnoticed. Even when they are detected, they are often not reported and not treated. This is bad for the sick person but also for the community as TB is very contagious.

Lesson learned

Providing the health professionals with the right tools could go a long way towards protecting people from this deadly disease.