About LMMS
Waiting in line is never easy—just think about the recent long lines forming for H1N1 vaccinations across Canada. For families in Africa, who require humanitarian assistance, this is the norm. They line up for hours to receive life-saving food aid and relief supplies.
World Vision Canada, together with a Canadian IT company FieldWorker Mobile Technology Solutions, has come up with an answer— Last Mile Mobile Solutions (LMMS)—a mobile technology that makes food distributions faster and fairer.
With the swipe of a photo ID card, families receive the right amount of food without all the waiting and the paper work. It’s simple…we do it all the time in Canada with our health cards, drivers’ licenses, library cards and passports.
LMMS eliminates the reliance on paper-based systems, automatically calculates accurate food rations and delivers faster web-based reports to donors and stakeholders.
The challenge has been how to replicate the same solution in locations where there is no electricity, no Internet and often in the middle of a crisis situation. World Vision Canada and FieldWorker Mobile Technology Solutions, along with World Vision International’s Food Programming Management Group (FPMG) and robust hardware manufacturer Intermec, have overcome those challenges to apply an innovative business logistics solution to the humanitarian sector.
As a relief, development and advocacy organization, World Vision is the U.N. World Food Programme’s biggest partner in food distribution and is actively involved in raising awareness and funds to fight global hunger. World Vision is using LMMS as one way to ensure that we can extend life saving food aid, efficiently. We started piloting the technologies in Kenya and Lesotho. Starting in 2010, LMMS will be further tested in large-scale food distributions in Uganda and Zimbabwe.
The History of LMMS
Delivering aid is a long process. We need to determine what the needs are; raise money and purchase the goods; and finally, ship, verify and distribute them. “Last mile” in LMMS technology describes the final step of aid delivery, where relief goods finally make it into the hands of children, women and men who need them.
In the pilot phase, LMMS has been used for food aid distributions to about 25,000 people in Kenya suffering from years of drought. In Lesotho, LMMS has been used in programs that give supplementary food to about 4,000 most vulnerable people, namely women and children. Our immediate goal is to expand LMMS to meet the food programming needs of more than 100,000 people across four countries: Kenya, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Uganda.
The success of these trials has prompted World Vision to set a goal of expanding the technology into more than 30 countries in the next five years, and applying LMMS not only in food distribution but in other areas of relief and development.
Costs and Benefits
Our field staff says communities are enthusiastic about the new technology and people are spending less time waiting in line. By owning their own ID card, families also feel they are actively participating in making the food distribution work.
World Vision staff are also excited about LMMS since they can receive IT training and do their work faster and better. LMMS makes it easier for staff to monitor food projects. Reports that normally take days in the current paper-based system are now completed at the push of a button. Preliminary results show there was a 75 per cent reduction in the registering and verification times at food distributions. LMMS
Innovation
The project is an example of how the humanitarian and the private sectors can effectively partner together to improve the way we help people who are in need.
LMMS captures crucial information using handheld computing units that wirelessly transmit that information to permanent database storage for analysis and reporting. The mobile features enable staff to send and retrieve data in the field. Staff can capture information about families in a matter of seconds by scanning their ID cards with the handheld device and update the database. This results in more accurate and faster data management as well as more efficient field operations.
Security
Every component of LMMS is password protected. Data is encrypted, meaning that if the devises are stolen or data is intercepted while in transmission, without passwords—everything is scrambled and impossible to read.
If you would like to find out more about the LMMS project, please go to Frequently Asked Questions and Answers.
For further information, please contact:
Jay Narhan, Program Manager -- LMMS, Humanitarian & Emergency Affairs
World Vision Canada
Email: jay_narhan@worldvision.ca
Phone: +60‐12‐234‐2380 (Malaysia)
Otto Farkas, Director, Humanitarian & Emergency Affairs
World Vision Canada
Email: otto_farkas@worldvision.ca
Phone: +1‐416‐716‐9522 (Canada)
Thabani Maphosa, Senior Director, Operations and Strategy, Food Programming &
Management Group
World Vision International
Email: thabani_maphosa@wvi.org
Phone: +27‐82-301‐8274 (South Africa)
