Development of web-based residential care centre management information system (RCC-MIS) in Tanzania

The use of Information Systems (IS) in developing countries like Tanzania is necessary for overcoming development challenges as Web-Based Information Systems (WBIS) could be used to strengthen information sharing among communities, allowing for decentralized decision-making through the development of indicators, collection and dissemination of information, and the utilization of data for decision making. This research is aimed at reducing the time delays caused by late response to the needs of Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) by the Ministry of Community Development Gender and Children (MCDGC), Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s), individuals and other stakeholders who are key players of taking care of these children. The study has used the three types of research methodologies whereby quantitative methods based on exploratory study was used in order to identify, analyze and determine the effectiveness of the available MIS for RCCs in Tanzania. This was followed by Qualitative methods based on PAR in order to determine the new system requirements. Finally the ISDM based on RAD was chosen in order to design and develop the webbased RCC-MIS prototype. For system development the study used object-oriented (OOP) programming based on model-view-controller (MVC) architecture in conjunction with MySQL as the back end data store. The user interface was designed using a variety of technologies including PHP, MVC, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and Apache.