Computers

Emma Okonji

Afrigrants Resources, an indigenous company with a passion to provide solution to the needs of Africa’s emerging social enterprise sector, has developed local software for social enterprise workers.

The software known as Seeker, is designed to address the challenges faced by social enterprise workers and the Not for Profit Organisations (NGOs), when putting up letters and proposals to local and international donors for sponsorships. The software, which was developed in Nigeria by Afrigrants Partners, was launched in Lagos recently.

Afrigrants Partners, Funmi Balogun, Doris Mbadiwe, Thelma Ekiyor, and Akin George Taylor who spoke at the launch and training on the use of the software, said the concept to develop a local software for social enterprise workers, was borne of their several years experience in providing solution to complex needs of Africa’s emerging social enterprise sector.

According to them, most social enterprise workers were faced with challenges of writing good business proposals and letters that will attract sponsorship from donor bodies, and most of them do not have the skills of proper accounting records that will boost their chances of getting sponsors to finance their projects. The software is designed not only to address the listed challenges, but to also help them to source for donors that have grants to offer.

“Afrigrant partners have several years of experience working with different international and local bodies and in the process we had experiences why some Social Enterprises and NGOs find it difficult to get grants from local and international donors. What we did was to develop a local software tool that will help address the challenges. We want prove that we have the intellectual and technology knowhow to design solution that will address our needs.

We want to use Seeker Software to achieve efficiency in doing social network and not for profit businesses,” they said.
Addressing the issue of piracy, the partners said several measures had been put in place to protect the software from being pirated.

“Piracy is a scourge in our society. We have created some security features that will make it difficult for people to pirate our software. We created a licence key formula. Only registered customers can have access to the software, through a generated code number,” they said.

Sold at 10 per cent discounted rate for early purchases, the Afrigrants Partners said the software would run on Windows XP, Windows 7 and Vista, and it is designed for one computer per software, which allows multiple usage from a single computer. The “Seeker Software” is an enterprise-wide grants, information and project management software designed for organisations that seek funding in Africa. It simplifies multiple tasks for organisations and enables them store and manage large volumes of information, and addresses issues of proposal, concept note and letter of inquiry wizards; implementation plan templates; letters template; narrative and financial report tools; and donor directory, among others.