The Project

All the ministries within the Malawian government currently use a single HR/Payroll system known as ‘Global.’ This system is kept updated by a dedicated team of staff that report into central government, if any ministry wants a change made on the system (e.g. a new person being employed, someone leaving or a change to a pay grade) then they must fill out a paper form which is signed off by the HR director for that ministry before being passed to the central team who then manually adjust the system data.

As you can imagine this process is slow and error prone, but that’s not all. Here’s a summary of the main problems the ministry of health currently experience with the system;

• The ministry (MOH) must specify staffing requirements for each hospital which are represented as open positions on Global. Unfortunately the current business process is to only review these requirements once every 5 years and so to work around interim requirement changes MOH must often assign staff to one hospital when they are actually working at another.
• Due to dirty or incomplete data and complex reporting structures it’s often possible for a corrupt supervisor to continue to claim an employee’s salary as part of the hospital budget even after that staff member has left or died. These are known as ‘ghost workers’
• Because global has to accommodate every ministry it’s very generic and does not have many health sector specific fields that the MOH would like to see. This makes it hard to assess where skill and service shortages are

The proposed solution to tackle these issues is a new information system specific to MOH which can be tailored to their needs and can be integrated with Global to keep payroll in sync. The starting point for this is an open source, LAMP* web app called iHRIS;

http://www.ihris.org

 iHRIS has been written specifically to tackle HR process problems in developing countries and has already been successfully deployed in a number of areas. Our first job will be to branch and customise the software for Malawi’s data requirements; we will then be looking to integrate the software with the existing Global system so that data consistency can be maintained.

The project promises to be both technically and politically challenging in a number of ways. Politically the office that is responsible for Global is considered higher up the food chain than the ministry and so getting their buy in on the integration project will be key. Technically, aside from the integration of software the physical infrastructure for the project also poses some problems. There is currently nowhere to run the production environment, we have budget to buy a server but we have nowhere to physically put it. There is also very poor internet connection for much of Malawi so connectivity to the system in some districts will be tricky. If that weren’t bad enough, we’re currently not even sure if some of the district hospitals have computers or people who have the skills to use them.

Initially the whole project team will be based in Lilongwe while we’re building out the system. Once that’s done we’ll be moving out to the districts to trial the system and assess hardware and training requirements.

Will keep you posted…

*Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP