One of our three sub projects for <a title="Association de lutte contre le sida" href="http://alcs.ma" target="_blank">ALCS</a> is the program data collection. As a short summary, the “field workers” (the doctors and volunteers who are in direct contact with the target population all over Morocco) collect and report activity specific data, e.g. how many education sessions were held, how many known or new contacts they worked with or how many prevention material for STD (sexually transmitted diseases) they could distribute. This is a good amount of data which get gathered, merged and validated on different organizational levels. Currently, this process is based on Excel sheets and a lot of copy-paste work – obviously with the risk to corrupt data and a long processing time. But to make it clear: even we as IT guys were impressed by the effort, quality and functionality in these files. The macros helped us a lot to understand dependencies and design requirements.

<img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-230" src="http://morocco.chickenfactory.ch/wp-content/uploads/alcs_programdata_excel_600.jpg" alt="Operational data collection reporting sheet" width="600" height="259" />

This is the point where we came into picture. Dr. Ouarsas traveled from <a title="Agadir (Wikipedia)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agadir" target="_blank">Agadir</a> to Casablanca to give us further details and to explain the desired future state. This meeting changed our viewpoint a little – it is not only about setting up a database to replace Excel files, but to give recommendations and a draft for a framework, targeting a configurable and extensible application. Also, we recognized the similarities and dependencies between the budget-related challenges and those of Dr. Ouarsas. We have to think big and to combine our findings in order to be able to provide a sustainable solution for ALCS' future requirements.

<a href="http://morocco.chickenfactory.ch/wp-content/uploads/alcs_ouarsas01_1024.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-229" src="http://morocco.chickenfactory.ch/wp-content/uploads/alcs_ouarsas01_1024.jpg" alt="Dr. Ouarsas explaining the requirements" width="1024" height="768" /></a>