An international charity is set to see its reporting procedures and management systems enhanced, enabling it to analyse more effectively and efficiently the vital work it does across Africa, thanks
to a donation of thousands of pounds worth of consultancy time by a UK business intelligence agency.
Self Help Africa has been provided with additional management information by Midlands-based Purple Frog Systems Ltd, specialists in the design and implementation of business intelligence solutions, which aims to enhance the charity’s existing accounting procedures, enabling its team to effectively communicate with partners across the globe in a matter of minutes.
Alison Cowan, Finance Manager at Self Help Africa, said: “As a charity, we work across eight sub-Saharan countries to ensure the sustainable development of agriculture and food production, and being able to accurately and efficiently report on exactly what we’re doing in each individual region to not only our own staff and partners, but to our funding bodies, is absolutely vital.
“The team at Purple Frog has provided us with a system that will enable us to generate a full series of standardised browser based reports with greater elements of flexibility, enable us to drill down further into the intelligence we have, and to communicate this effectively to our teams across Africa and throughout the rest of the world. We have already seen significant improvements to the way in which we use our business information and are very much looking forward to a longer term partnership with the team and further enhancement of our systems and capabilities as an organisation.”
Self Help Africa works with rural communities in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Togo, Uganda and Zambia to help them improve their farms and their livelihoods.
Alex Whittles, Director of Purple Frog, commented: “In addition to our work with businesses across the UK, we’re hugely committed to supporting charities both nationally and internationally, and are delighted to be working in partnership with Self Help Africa to help them enhance their existing business intelligence infrastructure.
“Self Help Africa, like many other charities, companies and organisations, tend to have a lot of data that they need to process, store and analyse, but often lack the internal infrastructure required to do it effectively. Its existing systems are used very much as a daily management accounts database and the reports it generates are non-uniform and require a significant degree of time commitment by the team.
“Working closely with the charity, we have been able to identify its precise needs and have successfully developed a new management information system which will enable them to undertake complex analysis of core information relating to its work by country, individual project, and specific time periods quickly and effectively.”
Purple Frog Systems Ltd specialises in all aspects of data architecture, data transformation, data warehousing, OLAP cubes and reporting systems, implemented using the Microsoft SQL Server suite of applications (Integration Services (SSIS), Analysis Services (SSAS) and Reporting Services (SSRS)).
Find our more about the great work of Self Help Africa here.
