Friday, October 9, 2020

Unleashing a generation of problem solvers

*|MC:SUBJECT|*
An update from Equip Mozambique!
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Church in Covid Times
Churches in Mozambique were finally allowed to reopen! 
However, they must abide by MANY new regulations...
Because of limits on space and people, Felizardo's church has to do 5 services every Sunday, and must disinfect all the chairs in between each service.

Interview with Tech Team

Our tech team took the initiative ON THEIR OWN to come up with AND LAUNCH a creative solution to new difficulties! I (Carla) did an interview with them to get the full story:

Carla: Aside from masks, handwashing, and distanced chairs, what is the government requiring of churches in order to reopen? 

Alex: Now each church needs to make a list of everyone who attends each service, and most churches have to do more than one service every week. They need to include each person’s name, address, phone number, and their temperature which is taken at the door. If the church has one person attend multiple services per week, they would need to handwrite all that same information over and over again. Now that large churches are allowed to have up to 150 people in attendance, it’s even harder! Imagine trying to write all that!

Carla: How did you come up with the idea for the app "Kultuare"?

Alex: Felizardo came to me with this thought of creating an app to help churches do this registration, and I told him I had already started thinking about it too. Together we made a rough sketch of the functions that would be helpful. 
Alex (left) is one of our lead programmers, and Felizardo (right) heads up our media team

 

Carla: So what are the problems that this new app helps resolve?

Alex: Kultuare helps to automate the attendance lists. It makes it to where the churches don’t need to write 150 names and contact details for every single service. The only thing they need to do is register them the first time they use the app, and every time that member arrives after that, they just need to look them up in the database and add their temperature. 

Bello: It saves people lots of time, and money and headache not having to have all these handwritten papers to keep organized!
 
Here are two of the many churches that have already adopted the Kultuare way of keeping track of attendance!

 

Carla: How much time would you estimate it takes to register 150 people by paper, and how much time is saved by registering them on the Kultuare app? 

Alex: I was part of the registration team at my church, so I can say it depends on how fast the person writes! [laughs] For me it usually took at least 45 seconds to a minute to register each person at the door, so even with two people writing it would still take over an hour to register everyone’s details as they enter. With the app, it could take 15 seconds or less, which brings down the time for two registration people to 10 to 15 minutes.

 
Bello (left) is the head of Equip Moz IT, and super happy with the team's initiative

 

Carla: How much time did it take from that first conversation between Alex and Felizardo until the app was launched? 

Bello: Only three weeks! In our department, I felt empowered to take initiative to think about the solutions to problems, which is one of the main things we have learned here in Equip Mozambique. We saw this project as an opportunity to apply and implement what we value and practice here. Normally, we just execute an idea that often comes from Jon, and we make it happen. But this time we have graduated to a new level to think for ourselves, and instead we came to Jon and said, “We had this idea, and we want to do this!”
Masks?     Thermometer?     Gloves?      Kultuare? 
So there you have it! Mozambicans creating Mozambican solutions to Mozambican problems! We are so incredibly proud of our team, and we look forward to seeing what else they do with their incredible creativity.

Get Involved

In fact, we are hosting a "Hack for the Gospel" event this month to encourage even more Mozambicans from other organizations and churches to collaborate, study problems and find solutions, and turn those ideas into reality! If you would like to partner with us in this endeavor, please donate below!
Donate to "Hack for the Gospel" here

Praise Reports:

  • That our team has reached a level of creativity and empowerment that they feel they can initiate and execute an idea from start to finish!
  • That our whole team has remained healthy this year.

Prayer Requests:

  • For continued protection of our team, COVID-19 cases are on the rise in Mozambique but so far it is not as deadly here as elsewhere. 
  • Please pray for peace in the northern region of Mozambique, which is struggling with some violent extremists taking over entire villages.
Thanks for reading, please remember us in your prayers! 
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