INETS, Tanzania
This summer, I had an amazing opportunity of interning at INETS—a software development company in Tanzania which designs and develops enterprise applications, payment systems, mobile applications, databases configurations and does Linux servers administration. One of the biggest problems in the education sector in Tanzania is the lack of a system to properly store and manage school’s data. Currently, all the schools’ data is recorded on paper which is susceptible to loss and damage. INETS has solved this problem through ShuleSoft─ a web system which offers an online easy and efficient way to store, manage, and analyze various school data with emphasis on students’ academic progress. Parents and teachers of a school using this system are now able to work closely together to best help students depending on their specific academic needs and challenges. My fellow intern and I were given the task of developing and deploying ShuleSoft’s first Android application which was aimed at improving access to and usability of ShuleSoft by educators, parents, and students.
Since my fellow intern and I had never done any mobile application development before, we spent the first week and a half getting familiar with the tools we were going to use for development. In the first week, we started by taking Udacity’s Android Basics by Google course which taught us the entire Android application development and deployment process by using the Android Studio software. It also offered us some guidelines to follow to make sure that the Android application we developed had a seamless user interface and experience. We then took another Udacity’s How to Use Git and GitHub course so that we could learn version control. Version control was very important because it enabled us to keep track of changes made by either of us and it also served as a way for our supervisor to track our progress in developing the application. However, since both of us had used version control in programming classes before, it only took us two days to finish the course as we only focused on the things we didn’t know.
Basically, any Android application is divided into two major parts, the views and the accompanying actions/responses of those views. The views are defined in xml layout files while the actions/responses of those views are defined in Java or Kotlin files. The views and the accompanying actions/responses are made to interact with each other through Activity files which are written in Java or Kotlin programming languages. With this in mind, my fellow intern and I divided the entire application development project between ourselves in terms of Activities. My fellow intern was responsible for the Splash Screen, Login Screen, and School Search Screen Activities while I was responsible for the Welcome Screen and Home Screen Activities. After the division of tasks, actual development began and whenever either of us completed a functionality, we would commit and push the work to the project repository so that the other and the supervisor could pull and test the functionality. This was essential to ensure that the functionality worked as intended in all devices.
Development continued until the end of the seventh week when the application was ready for deployment. However, we spent two more days thoroughly testing the app and tweaking a few things and finally deployed it to the Google Playstore on July 17. It got over 100 downloads in the first few days and over 500 downloads in the first three weeks. Being able to make a real impact in my society through the development and deployment ShuleSoft’s Android application which has improved ShuleSoft’s access and usability has been one of my best life accomplishments so far.
INETS is made up of only five members: three who write code and develop software and two who specialize accounting and marketing. The small size of the company and a casual and very friendly work atmosphere made it easy for me to directly approach any of the members whenever I needed assistance with anything. This also helped me to interview each member who was present to learn specific challenges that they face in running a software development company in Tanzania, and the tactics they are using to overcome those challenges. For example, one of the challenges that is hindering educators from adopting ShuleSoft quickly is the lack of technology usage knowledge among most people in Tanzania. INETS is solving this by offering free technology usage training to educators and parents in the schools using ShuleSoft. This strategy has been very effective and has become a selling point for ShuleSoft. This has helped me envision some of the strategies I could use in the future to start a successful technology company in developing countries like Tanzania.
In the process of developing the ShuleSoft Android application, my fellow intern and I often got multiple errors and bugs. Although our supervisor was available and willing to help us, he always challenged us to use the online development support community to look for the solutions to the problems we faced. This was very difficult and time consuming in the beginning as we couldn’t single out keywords from the bugs/errors that we could use to search online for specific solutions to the problems we faced. However, after doing this over and over every day for several weeks, we learned how to get keywords from the errors and bugs we faced which made it easy to look for solutions for them online. Having learned this skill has made me very confident to take on future development projects regardless of how much I don’t know about the development tools involved because I know now how to seek help when I encounter problems.
I have also learned that partners are very important in acquiring customers in a business. When the ShuleSoft system was initially deployed in 2016, INETS members visited various schools to market the system by themselves. This helped them to get about 60 schools to use their system in two years. However, two months ago, they partnered with NMB which is one of the two biggest banks in Tanzania. This partnership has done two major things: First, it has enabled parents to pay various schools fees all from the comfort of their mobile phones without having to queue at the bank and school to make and verify payments, and second, since most schools own an NMB account and frequently ask for loans from NMB, it was easy for NMB to convince them to use the system as the schools already trusted them through their services. After this partnership, INETS has been able to get more than 15 schools to use ShuleSoft in the past two months alone, and more schools are calling to ask how they can start using it as quickly as possible.
I want to express my sincere gratitude to the Williams ’68 Center for Career Exploration and the entire Class of 1966 for this opportunity. This experience has reaffirmed my sincere desire to pursue Computer Science and Economics as majors at Williams. And as I go back to Williams, I can’t wait to start applying what I have learned to develop systems that will solve other big problems faced by the education sector in developing countries like Tanzania.