Saving children from the streets with the cloud

Shanmukha ran away from home when he was just 13 years old. He was later found at the Bangalore city railway station, more than 200km away from his home, by field staff of the Don Bosco National Forum for the Young at Risk (Don Bosco). Through its vast network, Don Bosco reunited the 13-year-old with his family.

Shanmukha is one in 100,000 children that go missing in India every year. While the boy was safely found, 45 percent of children remain untraced forever. Left to their own devices, these children are vulnerable to many forms of exploitation, including forced labor, prostitution, and illegal organ trafficking.

Based in India, Don Bosco is a nonprofit network of organizations committed to saving these children from the streets, through tracking, tracing, and rehabilitation. With operations spanning 79 organizations across 18 states, the internal sharing of information is crucial to their search for missing children.

However, the nonprofit’s legacy web platform struggled to keep up with the growing number of users, and demands for better services and functions. To improve their operations, Don Bosco decided to develop the Child Management Information System and Services (Child MISS) application hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform in 2012.

The cloud-based application has enabled Don Bosco to find missing children in almost two-thirds of all reported cases since 2012, compared to just 35 percent of missing children before. Its new database also helped the nonprofit save significant resources that are put towards improving its child protection services.

Currently, Don Bosco is exploring the integration of biometric technology into Child MISS to refine its search process further. With this new technology, the nonprofit is optimistic that it will be able to reunite more children like Shanmukha with their families.

 

Learn more about how Don Bosco built an agile and robust information management system with Microsoft Azure. For more information on how Microsoft Cloud Offerings can help your nonprofit, visit www.microsoft.com/nonprofit.

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