RFP: International Programs Mapping and Monitoring Platform

May 27, 2010
By Kathy Miller

Water For People helps people in developing countries improve their quality of life by supporting the development of locally sustainable drinking water resources, sanitation facilities, and hygiene education programs. Around the world, 884 million people do not have access to safe drinking water and 2.6 billion are without adequate sanitation facilities. Every day, nearly 6,000 people who share our planet die from water-related illnesses, and the vast majority are children.

But the real failures are all the broken pumps, filled latrines, and solutions that aren’t sustainable. We want to change all that. The solution? Programs that last, that bring districts and municipalities to full coverage, where water solutions are paid for by local government and local communities in partnership with Water For People, and where solutions are implemented in such a way that these districts will never need another NGO’s support again.

Our vision is a world where all people have access to safe drinking water and sanitation, a world where no one suffers or dies from a water- or sanitation-related disease. That vision is within reach and we hope you’ll join us.

Project Description:

Water For People’s mission requires that it build, supervise, and maintain water and sanitation projects globally. In an effort to improve decision making, access to project data, and provide transparency within organization and with external partners the International Programs department is seeking proposals to build a comprehensive monitoring, evaluation, and mapping platform. This platform will be deployed at our country offices throughout the developing world and will manage project access data for hundreds of local projects growing to thousands of projects and installations over the next decade. This system will form the backbone of decision making about project status. As such the system needs to be highly available, reliable, inexpensive, and robust. The platform must support the collection of data in remote and primitive environments where access to power and data will be extremely limited. The system must be easy to use by trained water and sanitation industry professionals, local field staff, untrained volunteers, local volunteers, and local interns. The system must provide extensive customization options so that it can quickly adapt to the changing needs of Water For People headquarters and field staff. The platform should present summary and detailed data in a concise and consistent manner. Data and reports need to be customized by user and delivered via web and mobile interfaces. A few key outputs of the system will include maps, reports, and alerts on a project-by-project basis. Data should be stored and organized by time, country, community, technology, collection date, and status. Data should be available via application programming interfaces to other partners for additional and more detailed analysis. Access to data should be governed and restricted to authorized parties.

Project Duration:

Project shall commence in July of 2010 and continue through October 2010 with maintenance and possible later phases in late 2010 and 2011. Global rollout is scheduled for September 2010.

Technical and Infrastructure Requirements:

System shall be designed such that it takes advantage of contemporary hosting technologies such as cloud computing and storage. As such it should require little or no installation on Water For People infrastructure nor presume such infrastructure exists. Company shall provide configuration, maintenance, and operations support for system.

System Criteria:

Functional Requirements:

System shall allow the collection of program field survey data on a handheld device
System shall allow storage of data on device in disconnected mode (no available data network)
System shall allow syncing of data to server via:

Local file copy
Cellular network
Wireless local area network

System shall transmit data when network connection becomes available
System shall manage multiple users, roles, permissions on device
System shall auto update device
System shall support assignment of data collection jobs to specific or groups of devices
System shall support flexible creation of surveys
System shall support collection of following types of data:

GEO/GPS coordinates
Free Text
Option Lists
Dates
Question Dependencies
Pictures
Barcodes
Numeri
Video

System shall support creation/edit/deletion of surveys by non-technical staff
System shall support touch or keyboard input on handhelds
System shall maintain audit trails of survey changes
System should support groups of surveys, surveys should contain groups of questions, questions should be able to be reused on multiple surveys
System shall provide analytical tools to view survey data
System shall support customized views of data
System shall support custom report creation
System shall allow collection of data overtime
System shall allow generation of maps, preferably for Google Earth, Google Maps, and optionally analysis in Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS)
System must support KML and KMZ standards for map creation
System shall provide map views over time
System shall allow customization of data, layout, zoom, detail, animation, and structure of data on maps
System shall provide administrative consolesSystem shall restrict access to administrative functions by user, group, and role

Non-functional Requirements:

System must support Android based devices, but may also support iPhone or Windows Mobile
System should require little or no infrastructure deployed by Water For People
System should have appropriate backups and continuity plans
System should perform all functions in a timely manner (less than 4 seconds on average per page load)
System should provide uptime metrics and strive for greater than 99.6% uptime
System should be designed to minimize monthly hosting and infrastructure costs
Company shall provide maintenance estimates for 2 years
Company shall be able to provide remote assistance to global field staf
Company shall be willing to send technical representative to oversee field pilots, installation, troubleshooting, and training
System shall seek to minimize or eliminate subcomponent licensing costs by being built on open source software
Ability to interface with ODK or Java Rosa is beneficial
System should anticipate collection of data through other less-featured handset types via other data input such as Short Message Service or formatted email.

Evaluation Criteria:

Proposals will be evaluated on all of the above functional and non-functional requirements. System must meet all or nearly all of functional requirements and many or most of the non-functional requirements.

For additional information please contact Kathy Miller at Water For People (kmiller@waterforpeople.org).

Submission process:

Responses are expected in electronic form (such as email) to kmiller@waterforpeople.org

What do you think?