Booting Up Tanzania With Help From Google

News

Fast Company
February 1st, 2011

Credit: Envaya

By David Zax

An organization founded by a Stanford computer science student and former Peace Corps volunteer, Envaya aims to get East African grassroots organizations online. It recently snagged funding from Google.

When Joshua Stern, a graduate of Stanford with a degree in computer science, served in the Peace Corps in Tanzania from 2006 to 2007, one thing soon became clear.

“The major takeaway there,” he tells Fast Company, “was that the best development work being done was being done by these local groups, community-based organizations.”

The small groups were often the most effective–yet they had no web presence, no effective way to communicate with other small NGOs or to raise funds online. In 2008, Stern came back to California to work for a time at the startup Apture, but he’d left his heart in Tanzania. By early 2010, he and a few others had founded Envaya, whose mission was to boot up the small East African NGOs that had so impressed him. Now, a year later, 250 grassroots organizations in Tanzania use Envaya. The company has caught the attention of no less than Google, which gave Envaya a seed grant.

Envaya sites are simple but elegant. There are very few bells or whistles but they contain the basic information you’d want to know about a given organization. The simple design was crucial, since for many of these groups, the best way to access and update these sites is through cell phones with a simple mobile browser.

“The connection there is very slow, the organizations’ leaders typically have minimal computer experience, and many don’t speak English,” says Stern. “Envaya works in a low-bandwidth environment, and works in Swahili,” taking advantage of a drop-down menu that toggles any site between English and Swahili with the help of Google Translate and a volunteer who cleans up what’s lost in translation.

Story continues at Fast Company.