// Beyond the Box · Custom Software · 2024
The first national platform for coordinating humanitarian aid in El Salvador
SILAH · Protección Civil · ACNUR · UCA
National platform that digitized for the first time in El Salvador the management and distribution of humanitarian aid, coordinating in real time across multiple actors: government, academia, and international organizations.
- Our role
- Architecture, full development, QA, and sprint coordination within the consortium
- Platforms
- Web application
- Deliverables
- Management platform, map of active locations, inventory traceability, and institutional reports
// Impact in numbers
National platform of its kind in El Salvador
Institutions coordinated in real time
Manual processes in aid distribution
// The challenge
The General Directorate of Civil Protection (DGPC) operated without any digital tools to manage aid distribution at national scale. Processes were manual, uncoordinated, and without traceability, making it difficult to report to bodies like UNHCR. The project had to be executed in consortium with the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA), under international cooperation standards, with multiple government stakeholders as end users.
// What we built
- /01
Technical leadership in consortium
We owned architecture, full development, QA, and sprint coordination within a multi-institutional consortium involving academia, government, and international organizations — delivering under UNHCR-required standards.
- /02
Operational geolocation
Interactive map of active locations for national-scale distribution networks, with real-time visualization, filters by point type, and data export for institutional reports.
- /03
Real-time inventory traceability
Complete lifecycle tracking of supplies — from reception to final distribution —, with audit trail for every movement and reports for funding organizations.
- /04
Institutional configurability
Roles, documents, templates, and workflows fully configurable per institution. No additional development needed — each organization adapts the system to its operation.
- /05
Agile management with government
Iterative field validation with Civil Protection end users, continuous deliverable review, and constant adaptation to public-sector timelines and international cooperation standards.
- /06
Multi-actor coordination
Architecture designed for UN, academia, and government to operate on the same platform, with differentiated visibility, granular permissions, and cross-institutional approval flows.
// The impact
With SILAH, the DGPC has for the first time a centralized, real-time view of inventory, active locations, and national distribution flow. Decisions during emergencies are faster, UNHCR accountability is automatic, and a critical institutional capability that previously didn't exist in digital form now runs continuously.
// institutions and cooperation
Traceability and coordination for high-impact projects
When several institutions work on the same programme, the problem stops being technical and becomes one of coordination: who sees what, who approves what, and how the funder is accounted to.