Design of an Interactive Geo-Location Mobile Application for Civil Societies in East Africa

Abstract

This paper reports the developed mobile application through the use of advanced technologies such as mobile computing, cloud computing and Global Positioning System (GPS) in order to solve the challenges. The purpose of this study is find out how the recent advances and mass adoption of ICT by the public can best be leveraged to enhance the performance of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in East Africa. The data collection techniques used are through questionnaires, observations and conducting interviews with different stakeholders in the civil society arena i.e., the donors, the CSOs and the people in society that are given a voice by civil societies. In the system development phase, agile development methodology was used. Analysis of the data collected showed that there is a gap in the availability of a single or a centralized platform which can be easily accessed, user-friendly and reliable where different actors can readily get reliable and up-to-date information about the available CSOs they are interested in. To address this problem, an interactive online directory of CSOs has been developed. The platform is mobile based and enables CSOs to register and fill up their current details, thus ensuring that there is always correct and updated information. The platform is equipped with, among other features, a geo-mapping facility which enables users of the system to correctly geo-locate their civil societies of interest on a map view. The results of system evaluation showed that 88.125% of users were satisfied with the system basing on the evaluation criteria.