By Godwin Bonge Muhwezi
A group of undergraduate students of Computer Engineering at Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology (DIT) in Tanzania have developed a web-based application for handling complaints and grievances that will be replicated in all 16 Regional Flagship TVET Institutes (RFTIs) in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. The initiative is supported by the World Bank-funded East Africa Skills for Transformation and Regional Integration Project (EASTRIP) to enhance grievance handling and reporting among Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Institutes in East Africa and to support regional integration.
The web-based application is modelled on the World Bank Grievance Redress Mechanism (GRM) in line with EASTRIP Project requirements, which demand that each TVET institute supported by the project should have a grievance handling mechanism as part of the project targets.
The students developed the application under close supervision of Dr. Jospeh Matiko, the EASTRIP Project Coordinator and Lecturer at DIT. “The system allows different stakeholders to report grievances through an automated system for easy follow-up,” Dr. Matiko said in an interview with the EATRIP Skills Bulletin.
“The system has different chains of command which allow a complaint to be escalated to a higher level of command if it fails to get addressed at a lower level,” Dr. Matiko added. This allows timely resolution of complaints and grievances.
Students at Meru National Polytechnic College at their workshop. The Web-based application allows students from all RFTIs to record their grievances online.
Providing feedback to affected person is important in grievance handling. The system allows users to provide feedback at each stage of handling complaints. “The system is designed in such a way that stakeholders can record complaints in a specific interface which are received by the back-office staff to initiate the necessary action,” Dr. Matiko said. “At each stage of handling the complaint the client receives feedback and they can be able to monitor at what stage their complaint is.” This gives stakeholders’ confidence that their issues are being handled.
The success of the App has prompted the EASTRIP Leadership Team to replicate to other 15 Regional Flagship TVET Institutes being supported by the World Bank under the EASTRIP Project.
What started as an initiative by DIT to encourage students to be involved in real-life project has so far proven to be a blueprint for handling grievances in the entire EASTRIP Project countries.
“We are in the process of optimizing and enhancing the system to ensure that it can be used by other RFTIs,” Dr. Matiko said. The expanded system is expected to be hosted by Inter-University Council for East Africa (IUCEA), the regional facilitation unit, for the EASTRIP project.
Although application will be hosted on a central server, each RFTI will have access to institute specific information based. “The system will have different access profiles at regional, national and institute level and the profile will grant users access to information only required at their given level,” Dr. Matiko said.
When a group of undergraduate students of Computer Engineering at DIT (DIT) entered into a competition to develop solutions to real-life challenges, they did not expect to create a significant impact in the
Consequently. the web-based app, which was developed by undergraduate students for six months under close supervision of their lecturers, has proven to be solution needed to solve the challenge of handling grievance and complaints among 16 RFTIs in Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania.
The Writer is a Project Communication Officer for EASTRIP at IUCEA.
