Sahana EDEN: Open source Disaster Management, & Humanitarian aid Solution
Sahana EDEN is an open-source disaster & humanitarian aid information management system. It's built our of natural crisis management to provide a usable disaster management tool for NGOs & aid agencies.
When a natural disaster hits anywhere in the world, hundreds of organizations, aid agencies, NGOs, government agencies, & rescue teams rush to the area, followed by hundreds maybe thousands of volunteers.
The chaotic catastrophic event may leave impact itself on the aid efforts, & rescue operations carried out by local and international agencies, groups, and teams.
An unorganized effort may lead to several organizational errors, operation overlap, un-informed decisions, and cost a huge deal of time to overcome those issues, and focus on the victims. With good functional modern government and well planned centralized management, the issues can be minimized. But what if the disaster happens in a country with a corrupted regime?. Without the help of hundreds of aid agencies, NGOs, and volunteers the victim count may rise.
Sahana EDEN:
Sahana EDEN is a web-based aiming to ease the collaboration between teens, agencies, & volunteers. It provides many management tools to help manage resources, aids, rescue operations, human resources, and activities.
Sri Lanka Tsunami (2004): The birth of Sahana EDEN
The project was initiated by IT community members of Seri Lanka as it conceived and modeled by the first responders and front-line volunteers of official & NGOs in Seri Lanka Tsunami 2004. It is built to coordinate the rescue and aid efforts of many organizations, aid agencies, & thousand of volunteers.
Haiti earthquake (2010): Sahana EDEN in front lines
Haiti earthquake (2010), was a catastrophic disaster with an earthquake's magnitude of 7.0Mw, By 16:53 local time on Tuesday, 12 January, It hits the most populated area of the country near to the town of Léogâne. The Haitian gov reported the death tolls to have reached 230.000.
Sahana EDEN was deployed in Haiti earthquake disaster (2010) to organize rescue and aid operations, manage personal and resources, and provide a collaborative web-based platform for international & local NGOs & the government.
The project is modeled in crisis, on real-life scenarios and used successfully to manage several disasters around the world, It has been installed/ deployed in more than 60 locations worldwide, and used by several agencies around the world. It's translated to more 42 languages, and its community (developers) keep improving it day by day.
Benefits of Disaster management solution
- Assist organizations, managers and team leaders to make informed decisions
- Avoid operation overlap
- Centralized management
- Better coordination
- Save time
- Organized effort
- Ease collaboration, communication, for multi-organisation operations
- Allow managers, agencies to make better priority assessment
- Minimize time-waste
Sahana EDEN in numbers
- Used by +50 nonprofits organizations.
- Deployed in +60 locations
- Has +20 modules
- Translated to 42 languages
Who is using Sahana EDEN?
- Los Angeles County Department of Public Health
- International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent
- Timor Leste Disaster Management Directorate
- APBV - Portuguese Volunteer Firefighters
- Haiti 2010 Earthquake Response
- HELIOS Supply Chain and Inventory Sharing (UK)
- Disaster Risk Reduction Project Portal.
Highlights
- Easy to install by experienced developers
- Modular
- Supports Windows, Linux, & macOS
- Portable version for USB-drive
Features
1- Organization Registry
Organization register keeps track of all organizations, agencies, NGOs, and government-based organization. It registers and classifies every organization with its category, sector, and base location. Organizations will keep track of their human resources, assets, and inventory.
2- Project Tracking
Simple yet powerful, project management tool, it aims to provide information for decision-makers about: Who’s Doing What, Where, and When. This tool is an amazing feature as it keeps track of all running projects, requirement, resources, activities, personals, and outcome.
3- Human Resources Management
Human Resource management is a critical part as well as a primary feature of any crisis/ disaster management operation. Sahana EDEN provides it as an integrated option to manage teams, volunteers, aid workers, & rescue groups. It comes with ease register module per-organization and with global settings. Personals are categorized with their type, job titles, skills, and locations. The personal records are shipped with simple/ advanced search options with multiple filters support.
4- Stock, and Inventory management
Inventory management is an essential part of Sahana EDEN, It's packed by many features within the module that provided automated management for transactions, tracking shipments, and monitor the inventory items.
Inventory data can be shared between organizations to boost collaboration, improve operational efficiency, and ensure coordination between NGOs. (The HELIOS Foundation).
Other Features
- Assets management
- Assessments
- Reporting
- Scenarios & Events management
- Shelter Management
- Mapping support with Integrated GIS support
- Messaging/ Chat between organizations
- Import/Export supports with supports of many extensions (XML, CSV, JSON, XSL)
Platforms
Sahana EDEN can be installed on Linux, Windows, & macOS.
Developer's note
Sahana EDEN is built with Web2Py a Python-based framework for building modular web applications runs on Windows, Linux, & macOS. It uses JavaScript for the web client. It gives the developer a different database option like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite. It's recommended to run it on Linux for the best performance.
Deployment options
For deployment, First, let's agree on that: Linux is the best operating system to deploy, & manage this solution, it's recommended by project developers. There are several hosting options for deployment:
- Amazon EC2
- Heroku
- TurnKey
- PythonAnywhere
Well, Those are recommended by the developers, but I would recommend more options like Linode, and DigitalOcean.
License
The Sahana project is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License
Conclusion
Sahana EDEN is an effective disaster management and humanitarian aid collaborative platform solution. It saves time, boosts efficiency, improves outcome. It's an open-source project we encourage open-source software developers/ engineers to try to help this project.