Enabling Transparent and Efficient Drought Relief Delivery
Year:
2025
Service:
Beneficiary Management
Industry:
Deployed
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BeneficiaryManagement
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DroughtRelief
The Smart Zambia Institute partnered with Ooru Digital to digitize drought relief operations end-to-end, from offline beneficiary registration in remote areas to real-time cash transfer tracking, ensuring aid reached verified people quickly and with full accountability.
Introduction
The Smart Zambia Institute is a government agency tasked with advancing Zambia’s digital transformation agenda through the use of ICT and e-governance solutions. As part of its mandate, the Institute spearheaded the Zambia Drought Relief Program, aimed at delivering targeted social protection to communities affected by severe drought.
Challenge
A prolonged drought left thousands of households in urgent need of assistance. Coordinating relief efforts at scale required accurate beneficiary identification, secure verification, and transparent distribution tracking. Traditional, paper-based processes risked delays, duplication, and leakages, potentially reducing the program’s effectiveness. The Smart Zambia Institute needed a robust, digital-first solution to manage the relief cycle end-to-end—ensuring that aid reached the right people quickly and with full accountability.
Solution
The Smart Zambia Institute partnered with Ooru Digital to implement a customized beneficiary management and payment tracking system built on OpenG2P, a modular, open-source platform for managing social protection programs. The solution digitized the entire relief workflow, from beneficiary registration to cash transfer monitoring, while enabling real-time oversight.
Field agents used the ODK Collect mobile application to capture beneficiary details offline in remote areas with limited connectivity.
Collected data was synchronized with OpenG2P’s Social Registry and linked to newly created disaster relief programs with eligibility criteria based on a Proxy Means Test (PMT).
The system integrated with Zambia’s national eKYC service to verify beneficiary identities before disbursing aid.
Payment records from the sponsor bank were linked to beneficiary profiles, enabling real-time tracking of cash transfers.
A reporting dashboard provided government officials and partners with actionable insights for data-driven decision-making.
Result
Accurate and timely beneficiary identification, even in remote regions.
Seamless offline-to-online data synchronization, reducing delays in registration.
Trusted beneficiary verification via integration with national eKYC.
Transparent, real-time tracking of relief disbursements.
Data-driven reporting to guide policy and operational decisions.
Building on this success, the Smart Zambia Institute and Ooru Digital plan to extend the OpenG2P-based system to future disaster relief and social protection programs – enabling faster rollouts, improved beneficiary targeting, and more efficient fund distribution.
