Development and implementation of Au-tomated Worker Registration and Payroll Database for the Ebola Response Workers

Narrative Description of Project: At the height of the Ebola crisis in 2014, there was a huge problem of the majority of the Ebola Response Workers(ERWs) not receiving their share of the hazard payments on time, the monetary payments that were made to compensate them for the dangerous and critical work that they were doing in treating Ebola patients. The crisis was spiralling out of control, with an increasing number of ERWs threatening to go on strike. At this critical junction, we were tasked with developing a biometric verification and payment processing system for over 27000 ERWs across the country.

Using an innovative solution that utilised a cloud infrastructure and integrated with the existing mobile payment ecosystem,we created a payroll processing system through which we verified the identity of all 27,000 ERWs via biometric verification across the country and distributed hazard payments directly to them via mobile money.

For this project, we were declared winners of the 2016 Responsible Business Award in the International Disaster Relief Category

Description of Actual Services Provided by Our Staff:

1. Designed and developed the cloud based payment processing and biometric verification system for the Ebola Response Workers
2. Implemented an end-to-end data collection system that used smartphones, open source computer vision tools, ODK data collection toolkits and cloud computing to verify the mobile money payment processing and biometric verification of all ERWs
3. Verified NERC’s database of ERWs for fraudulent response workers via biometric verification using computer vision tools
4. Linked NERC’s Ebola workers payroll system to the mobile money gateways in Sierra Leone
5. Carried out the biometric verification and payment processing to 27,000 ERWs across the 14 districts of Sierra Leone
6. Provided on ground technical, logistic and operational support to the verification team

Verified the number of ghost dippers and fraudulent ERW workers in the system, and reported issues of hazard money mismanagement to the NERC