Africa COVID-19 Response Toolkit (ACRT) Community

The COVID-19 virus is spreading across the world like a wildfire across the globe, and now Africa.

We know from publicly available data that if urgent containment strategies are not implemented, the virus will spread quickly and get out of hand like in China, Italy, Spain, and now the US.

Coronavirus cases in Africa could surge from just thousands now (April 20, 2020) to 10 million within three to six months, according to provisional modelling by the World Health Organization (WHO). The World Bank predicts that Sub-Saharan Africa might be the region hardest hit.

Africa needs an army of tech volunteers from around the world to help African ministries, hospitals, local manufacturers, local restuarants, and global organizations mitigate and help flatten the curve in Africa. Data collection/analysis/reporting, awareness dissemination, housing vacancy repoting, and survelliance for contact tracing can all be extremly helpful in assiting those in Africa. Software is needed, and that is where you, the community come in! Whatever skills you have: whether that's programming, product/project management, design, etc. there is a way for you to contribute.

The projects

1. API - Core API for Africa COVID-19 Response Toolkit. Ingests and pushes data to Toolkit components.
2. Internal Dashboard - Internal dashboard for officials to get real time data and updates on COVID-19 on surveillance, case tracking, and monitoring.
3. Surveillance Forms - Online forms for reporting rumored COVID-19 cases.
4. Bot Starter Kit - A basic template/starter kit for building a Messenger or Telegram bot integrated with the core ACRT API.
5. Housing Vacancy Bot - A Telegram bot that allows housing officials/owners to report vacancy to a central source and allows health works/government officials to consume that information.
6. Heroes Bot - A Telegram bot that allows frontline healthcare workers to log symptoms they are experiencing, get counseling, best practice information, logistical assistance and provide creative ways to distress.
7. Awareness SMS - Node.js wrapper for Africa’s Talking SMS API. Allows government entities to send mass SMS to text the public critical COVID-19 related information.
8. Awareness Website - A static public website that any government body can use to spread awareness about COVID-19 to their population.
9. AWS Infrastructure Templates - AWS CloudFormation and Terraform templates to bootstrap AWS resources for ACRT projects.
10. Emergency Relief Package Tracker - Web app that allows organizations to track and manage the distribution of emergency relief packages.

Get involved

Hop in and take up any existing issue in the core projects above.

Countries using the Toolkit

🇪🇹 Ethiopia

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