Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOSThe OurMoz project won, last April 15, the #APPS4MAPUTO contest, promoted by UX and the World Bank in Mozambique, a competition which aimed to select a mobile App for use on the project Participatory Urban Service Monitoring for Maputo Municipality (MOPA).
The #APPS4MAPUTO contest set the challenge to develop a mobile App aiming to enhance the events’ management and reporting processes carried out by the supervisors from the Direcção Municipal de Gestão de Resíduos Sólidos Urbanos e Salubridade do Município de Maputo, which use would allow a more efficient process of events’ identification, as well as the evaluation of solid waste collection services in the municipality.
The Android App developed within the scope of this competition allows the community supervisors to report situations detected on the field more rapidly; to consult geotagged events, according to a specific category or location; to validate the information submitted by citizens, as well as to give feedback about each situation’s resolution status, assuring that all information is integrated with participatory monitoring platform ntxuva.
The Application’s stability and usability, the reliability of the information communication, the App’s positive response to the needs of the Participatory Urban Service Monitoring for Maputo Municipality, as well as its capacity to motivate the supervisory workers, were among the qualities acknowledged to the group of young research students Mauro Banze, Félix Barros e Alfredo Muchanga, from the OurMoz team. Moreover, these were the evaluation criteria applied to all solutions submitted to the contest and assessed by judges a panel, which comprehended representatives from several major organizations, such as the World Bank, the Swedish Embassy in Maputo, the mobile communications company mCel, the startup Ideario, and the company UX.
Co-funded by the Programa Operacional Regional do Norte (ON.2), through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), the OurMoz project is a mobile, citizen centered platform that provides real-time geotagged information about what is happening within Mozambican cities and results from a partnership between the Fraunhofer AICOS and the Informatics Center of Eduardo Mondlane University (CIUEM), under the scope of the Information and Communication Technologies for Development Competence Center (ICT4DCC).
As a product of the cooperation between these two partners, as well as the knowledge transfer activities and the close collaboration between researchers, the OurMoz App will continue to be developed under the scope of the ICT4DCC in Mozambique, also as a concept validation process and as a potential replication solution for other countries.
As results of this contest, and beyond the award of 1.000 USD to the winning team, it is anticipated that the OurMoz App would be integrated in the scope of the project MOPA, funded by the World Bank and implemented in the Municipality of Maputo.