Global Goods Software for the Immunization Cold Chain

Abstract

This paper explores the challenge of taking Global Goods software to international scale. Global Goods software is non-commercial software designed to support global development goals. We argue that a fundamental challenge behind this type of software is the different roles of the global organizations that fund projects, the country leadership that controls implementation, and the actual users of the software. To address this, it necessary to have a design process that balances interests of stakeholders and a technical design that allows for modularity and extensibility. We present a case study of an application for country level management of the immunization cold chain that we have developed and contrast it with major Global Goods software systems such as DHIS2 and OpenMRS. The contributions of the work include the design of a pipeline for building a Global Goods application that is deployed across multiple countries, a collection of lessons learned during system design and implementation, and a comparison of extensibility strategies of different global goods applications.