School Connect is an application that helps digitise information in schools in Africa.
Many school meal programmes still rely on slow and error-prone paper-based reporting and monitoring processes. As a consequence, key information can take several months to reach the programme management team, which delays programmatic decisions and impacts operations quality. In the worst case, this can lead to delayed food distributions and pipeline breaks, negatively affecting children’s school attendance.
School Connect digitises the entire data collection and analysis process in schools from data entry to visualisation on a near real-time dashboard. Daily data on attendance, consumption and stock inventory at schools included in school meal programmes helps to improve programme quality, optimize supply chain planning and reduce pipeline breaks. By making sure that hungry children get a meal every day, School Connect helps to increase attendance rates, especially for underprivileged children who are dependent on the meal at school.
School Connect has been deployed in all 500+ World Food Programme (WFP) programme schools in Burundi. It is expected to be deployed to 300+ more schools in Burundi in 2021/22. Successful pilots have also been conducted in Niger and South Sudan. Additional countries will follow in 2022.
To learn more, visit the School Connect app.