How a community service project won us a hackathon
By Prophet Agyeman-Prempeh, Sheamus Yebisi & Anthony Kwawu
For our community service project we decided to spend some time working with the Christ Ambassadors School. It is a private school that was set up by the late Dr. Rosina Gepi-Attee, a paediatrician who devoted her life to bettering the living conditions of her neighbourhood in Ankonam, Oyarifa, and until recently was surrounded by financially disadvantaged natives who had little hope for good education.
The school allows families to enrol their children at very low tuition costs, and offers an unorthodox flexible payment plan; a “pay as you earn” system that allows for fees to be paid depending on income flow. But the payment structure also means that the school’s administrators found it difficult tracking payments over time and this created several other problems. Some parents frequently claimed to have made payments for tuition which the school had no record of, but struggled to dispute because administrators recognised the weaknesses in their systems. Administrators also found it difficult to prepare accurate financial reports due to the nature of tuition payments, and the financial management systems made it difficult to keep the school in good shape.
As developers, we decided to build a simple software tool to help the school address this challenge. The Java based application, called CASSOFT (inspired by the initials of the school’s name), allowed the school’s administrators to better record transactions and provide payment details to families.
When we signed up to join the Oracle Academy Hackathon, we used the competition as an opportunity to build version 2.0 of CASSOFT, building in functionality to allow the application to work without internet access, among other new features. The success of the application with Christ Ambassadors School, made us realise that it could be designed to work for other rural schools in Ghana as well.
Click here to watch the presentations at the University of Ghana Business School
We are grateful for the effort our professors at Ashesi put into helping us become better developers, especially from Dr. Nathan Amanquah, Dr. Ayorkor-Korsah and Mr. Aelaf Dafla. Winning the hackathon not only provided a boost in our confidence, but helped us understand that the skills we are learning in the classroom can have a real impact on solving the problems around us. We hope to improve the application to allow other students to deploy across Ghana when they do service learning in rural schools.
