- Total funding of 2.3 million lei, allocated through the national program „Connecting for Good”
Bucharest, February 26, 2019 – The Vodafone Romania Foundation joins Code for Romania’s program Civic Lab as a strategic partner with the mission to build software applications for various civic health and education projects. The Vodafone Romania Foundation will fund some of the identified solutions, which will be implemented in two strategic areas for the organization’s activity, through the National „Connecting for Good” Program. The total budget allocated for the development and implementation of the applications is 2.3 million lei.
The Civic Lab program uses a methodology developed by Code for Romania and aims to solve the real needs of society by generating solutions with systemic impact and measurable long-term results. The Vodafone Romania Foundation and Code for Romania launched the new partnership by publishing the online form What keeps you awake at night, whereby anyone can report problems in the two areas of interest supported by the Foundation, more precisely: The Health of Mother and Child and Human Resources in Education.
With the help of the online form What keeps you awake at night, the Civic Lab program aims to involve the community in the research process and identify issues linked to the health and education areas. For each of these, there is a research plan in place, which includes the debating issues in focus-group sessions with experts, conducting interviews, data analysis and direct observation sessions. Based on the results, the Code for Romania team assesses existing technical solutions from other countries to identify best practices and ideas that are applicable in similar situations in Romania. At a later stage, the organization’s specialists prepare prototypes of digital solutions based on the findings of the research, which they then test directly with the beneficiaries. In the final stage, prototypes, accompanied by technical documentation and research results, are presented in an online platform to potential developers.
Code for Romania is a non-governmental organization active in the field of civic technology. The organization develops open-source, pro-bono software solutions for solving social problems with the help of a community of over 600 volunteers from Romania and Diaspora. Code for Romania is part of the largest international network of civic technology organizations, Code for All.
The Vodafone Romania Foundation is a Romanian nongovernmental charitable organization, established in 1998, which operates separately and independently from the Vodafone Romania SA’s business. During its 20 years of activity, Vodafone Romania Foundation has funded 1,132 programs run by 730 NGOs throughout the country, in the fields of healthcare, education and social services. These projects had 3 million beneficiaries – children, young and old people, physically, socially or economically disadvantaged. So far, the Vodafone Romania Foundation has invested over 30 million euros in projects run by nonprofit partner organizations. More details about the Foundation’s programs are available at fundatia-vodafone.ro, http://jurnaldebine.fundatia-vodafone.ro/ and www.facebook.com/fundatiavodafone.
