Description

Open-ihm is an Open Source software development project that will make state of the art poverty analysis tools freely available to researchers worldwide. The project originates with the work of John Seaman and Celia Petty, the founders of Evidence for Development (EfD). They recognised that much of the failure and waste in development projects was due to a lack of local economic information and that the methods used to collect this information –designed for modern western economies-simply didn’t work. Open-ihm is a ground breaking collaboration between EfD,a UK based Non Governmental Organisation (NGO), Chancellor College, University of Malawi and the University of Wolverhampton. The project is taking software produced by Evidence for Development for the purpose of income measurement and modelling in poor rural areas of the developing world, and putting this on an Open Source platform, where it can be maintained, developed and customised by a global community of programmers.This unique project is also building capacity within the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Chancellor College, to manage complex collaborative software development projects, thus extending new high tech job and career opportunities in one of Africa’s poorest countries. The project’s design phase has recently been completed and the software is on track for completion the next four to six months. Thereafter, the Open-ihm team plans to continue its work producing Open Source software to tackle fundamental problems of poverty and social exclusion. Project work-flow has been designed to ensure that contributors to the project will easily be able to contribute code, documentation and technical support to the project. The software itself is based on the common paradigm of a data store (in this case based on the open source MySQL database) which is accessed via a simple user interface, written in Python. One of the challenges of the project is to ensure that the software is flexible enough to respond to the day to day needs of economists and development agencies who use it in the field. This is helped by a close relationship between the project managers in Malawi, their colleagues in the Department of Economics and Evidence for Development.