Mobility helps UN improve food distribution

Enterprise software company Tigerspike has completed a project to develop a mobile framework to help the UN World Food Programme (WFP) transform its food distribution processes.

The company worked with the WFP to recommend ways to make its registration and distribution processes faster and more secure, using technologies including mobile phones, smart cards and SMS-based e-vouchers.

The project covered areas including device strategy, data management, record management, biometrics, security and battery life concerns.

Tigerspike CEO Luke Jansen said 200 employees across the company’s seven offices contributed to the project. “Working in a rapid style meant that multiple streams of work could be started across the world to create efficiencies and deliver a solution in 72 hours.”

The UN’s WFP provides food assistance to around 90 million people across 80 countries each year.

The organisation has a target of delivering nearly a third of its assistance programs in the form of cash, vouchers and through ‘digital food’ - essentially food vouchers distributed via mobile phones - by 2015.

Paul McCann, a consultant within the IT department of the WFP, said the organisation was looking for “a mobile solution that would help us achieve significant hardware and logistic efficiencies in the near and long term. The rapid prototype gives us a considerable leg up for future developments and decisions around our platforms, device strategy and system architecture.”

Image courtesy of UNAMID under CC