New Client Flow in the Lumana Program

When I first arrived in Ghana, we had developed new metrics for evaluating potential clients, new surveys for villagers, and a whole host of new procedures.  As Cole, Karin, and I set out to begin spreading the word of our program and knocking on gates to deliver surveys, we ended up with a lot of data and long list of people wanting to sign up for loans. 

So, as those survey clients began to come to our office and asked about joining our microfinance program, we weren’t sure who to accept and how to group everyone.  How did we make sure everyone completed our education classes? How did we build in enough checks and balances that we could remain objective and protect ourselves?  Our “do-it-first-codify-it-later” approach worked for our first class of 30 clients.  But by the second class, we had well over 300 people showing up and enough teachers to run a class of at least 80.  This required a much more sophisticated design for managing the information in an efficient way and getting people through the application process as easily as possible.  So, I leaned on my Information Systems 460 class from the UW Foster Business School and created a process flow diagram. 

The first thing I mapped was a basic outline of the process a client went through from the time they met with us to the time they completed a loan cycle. I then identified the places that could make a person ineligible for our program (the circles) so we could create ways of helping them fix what they needed to and get back in.   I also needed to pinpoint all the decisions (diamonds) along that our Ghanaian Field Officers might encounter so we could provide adequate employee training. 

I broke it out into 3 phases, one for the application process, one for the education process, and one for the loan cycle process.  This provided a clear idea of how our clients “flowed” through our program, the strengths and weaknesses along the way, and became the foundation for points on our self-designed credit rating system. 

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Health in the Keta District

Global health is a hot topic right now.  Yet, as any company designing products and services to address health issues in the developing world knows, the design is only the first step.  There are plenty of stories of great designs but poor product adoption, especially due to cultural oversights.  Be that as it may, we at Lumana are opening our data to social businesses so they can effectively identify sites, integrate products, and provide education to ensure effective use. 

Looking at the map for the Keta District, the first thing visible is a that there is a gap on the eastern shore between Anloga and Tegbi and another in the mid-west between Tregui and Hatorgo.  This might be an opportunity for mobile health units or for durable products such as rehydration packets to treat malaria that don’t need to be administered by a health professional. 

Despite this, the District Assembly reports that as of the year 2000 93% of the population has used a hospital or health center, while about 36% used other health facilities.  Also, less than 2% used spiritual and traditional healers.  Of the 1887 people surveyed (an admittedly small sample size, not even 1% of Anloga), nearly 20% said they live more than 10km from a facility.  Traveling even 10km can be difficult if you don’t live on a major road with access to transportation and even if you do, the condition of roads can significantly impede the speed of travel.  Because people aren’t able to reach a facility as easily, this is a great opportunity for information technology to step in and bridge the distance or for disease cutting technologies such as water/sewage purifiers. 

We can also see a change in the number of disease cases from 1996 to 2000, however this corresponds with an increase in access to health facilities so may just be a result of actual/better diagnosis.  We also know that people are using these facilities because a full 68% of babies were delivered at a health care facility and 81% of the survey respondents received their medications from a gov’t health facility.  Clearly, if you are creating a medicine or health product, then a good point of distribution is through the health centers and residents are open to new techniques and technologies. 

Overall there is an opportunity here for health care services.  There is an established distribution point (that is in desperate need of computer synchronization), two sizeable areas for first-mover’s advantage with an innovative health facility, and a population ready for modern technology.  Already, the Economist reported in Sept. 2009 that Ghana had reached teledensity of 98% (although the IFC says this is less than 10% for rural/semi-urban areas).  The Keta District though, does have ubiquitous cell phone coverage and is ripe for health care apps that can tie these health care facilities with related products and services. 

*If you are interested in doing business in the Keta district or would like access to more information, please contact us at contact@lumana.org.

*If you can’t see a title on the graph, hover over it and a display will appear.

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Keta District (Volta Region, Ghana) Population

Here it is, the first ever interactive map for the Keta District using Tableau Software (and a mapping tip from Cleary and Simply).  In case you’re not familiar with Lumana, our microfinance operation is based in Atorkor and has officially expanded to the nearby villages of Dzita and Dzita Agbledomi, but also includes clients from Srogboe and Anloga. 

On the left is a map of the district with the size of the circle representing the size of the population.  On the right is a graph depicting population over the last 40 years of the 20th century.  Notice that the village of Keta used to have the highest population in the 60’s but has now fallen severely.  This is mostly due to land loss from erosion.  During my stay in Ghana, I observed that many of the villagers were full of children and grandparents.  What the growth rate doesn’t reveal is how many young adults are leaving rural areas for opportunities in the cities, and sending children to live with the grandparents back in the village.  For that we would need to look at age composition over time, but unfortunately I only have data for the year 2000 as you can see in my last post. 
* Click on any city name to highlight it on the map.  Hover over any data point to see the numbers. 
* Select the “arrow” graphic at the bottom to zoom in on the map and pan around.  

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Keta District (Volta Region, Ghana) Demographic Info

As part of our microfinance project in Ghana (Lumana), I’ve been looking into a report published by the Keta District Assembly on the progress of their Development Plan in 2000.  Ghana is pretty tribal, so it’s expected that over 91% of the population in our area is Ewe (eh-way).  Also typical throughout Africa is a young population, for our district over 81% of the population is under age 30 and 40% is under age 14.  What is also interesting is that over 80% of the population is self employed without an employee.  This closely matches my observations on the ground and actually results in oversaturation of the market and depresses prices below profitable levels (the point of a business in rural Ghana is not always for profit, but to maintain cash flow, so non-profitable ones don’t close down). 

Part of what Lumana hopes to achieve this summer through our Open Data Kit project is to update and build on this information.  We intend to leverage this demographic data in order to facilitate new international social business ventures, as well as invest in local “shovel ready” businesses so that industries can undergo some consolidation, processes can be improved, and economies of scale can be achieved. 

Later, I’ll publish info on transportation, agriculture, schools, market revenue streams, etc. 

*Click on any data point on a graph to see the numbers. 

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Dashboards

Dashboards are the type of thing I stay up for days on end for and miss meals sometimes because I'm so excited about building one. Most of the time, these dashboards are in MS Excel although recently I had the opportunity to build quite a few in Tableau.

However this post is about Google Wave. I mentioned in my last post that I was looking for a way of tracking my projects. Additionally, my microfinance company, Lumana, uses Google Wave almost exclusivley for document generation and archiving. With at least 10 volunteers at all times creating documents, my inbox is easily flooded.

The simple solution is to create a dashboard that links to all related waves. All you need to drag and drop the wave onto the dashboard wave and it automatically creates a hyperlink. Then, simply store the dashboard wave in a dashboard folder so that it's easy to locate. I also created a wave that acts as my "journal", similar to a journal in MS Outlook. Only, I manually link to all the project waves, emails, and websites that I've been working on.