Mobile Verification of Vouchers in the Humanitarian Sector

On March 4, 2015 the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) addressed the Inter Agency Standing Committee in Geneva. The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC)is the foremost coordinating body in the humanitarian assistance sector. It is a forum involving the key UN and non-UN humanitarian partners. It is chaired by a UN High Commissioner. The NRC discussed mobile verification for voucher projects in Jordan for Syrian refugees. According to Roger Dean, the cash and voucher coordinator for NRC Jordan, the presentation was well received. He added, “We’ve created quite a stir here.”

We wrote about the NRC’s innovative mobile voucher project several months ago. CodeREADr is proud to support such a worthy cause. We are excited to watch mobile verification of vouchers continue to prove its applicability around the world. Congratulations to Roger, NRC’s management and their entire team.

DOWNLOAD THE NRC PRESENTATION ›

“Mobile phone-based money is undeveloped in Jordan and regular cash was considered to present unacceptable safety issues in the context of Zaatari camp in particular. Vendor tie-in to third party e-card hardware would not have given the flexibility or control desired. A new, interim solution was required.

CodeREADr is a combined cloud-database and smartphone app service, used most commonly for concert and airline ticketing and asset tracking, and was not known to have been used in the humanitarian sector before. It is extremely flexible and can be set up to address many different needs. For this use case we needed cashiers to be able to verify or reject barcodes on vouchers presented at checkout…

Alongside reliable voucher verification, the most important feature of a CodeREADr-based system is the richness of live data it produces. Questions can appear on the handsets at any point in the scan process, potentially returning numbers, text, multiple-choice selections or even photos and scans of other barcodes. This scan data appears immediately on the web admin panel and can be filtered and exported to Excel for further processing. This has allowed NRC to gather an unprecedented variety of data on customers’ shopping patterns.”