Towards high-impact community-based projects through data-driven monitoring - a case study of the community service centre at Strathmore University

Abstract

Over the year’s philanthropic spirit has been on the rise across the globe. The gesture has enabled community outreach make strides in impacting and uplifting the livelihood of poor stricken nations and communities. A lot of projects have been funded and executed to completion successfully and commissioned to and opened to the public to serve the community. When a sustainability checks are conducted on whether projects are still useful to the community members you always find that their projects are under-utilized or not running at all. This study was aimed at finding an appropriate approach to come up with a community-based analytics tool that is a web-based system to help oversee and monitor project progress in order to achieve high impact community-based projects. In order to achieve that a myriad of surveys and analysis of the feedback collected along was conducted in order to see if the projects being done were on course and in line with the initial goals upheld and chances of adoption once completed were high. The Web-Based information system was developed using standard HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. The REST API was developed using the Go Programming Language. The PostgreSQL database management system was used to persist the data in a relational database. The community feedback provided by the community via the analytic tool helped the stakeholders converse and if necessary, the project was re-routed for optimality and usefulness to the local community hence helping the community spearhead their journey towards sustainability