Nurture the sprouting bud; do not uproot it. Using saving groups to save for maternal and newborn health: lessons from rural Eastern Uganda

Background: Saving groups are increasingly being used to save in many developing countries. However, there is limited literature about how they can be exploited to improve maternal and newborn health. Objectives: This paper describes saving practices, factors that encourage and constrain saving with saving groups, and lessons learnt while supporting communities to save through saving groups. Methods: This qualitative study was done in three districts in Eastern Uganda. Saving groups were identified and provided with support to enhance members’ access to maternal and newborn health. Fifteen focus group discussions (FGDs) and 18 key informant interviews (KIIs) were conducted to elicit members’ views about saving practices. Document review was undertaken to identify key lessons for supporting saving groups. Qualitative data are presented thematically. Results: Awareness of the importance of saving, safe custody of money saved, flexible saving arrangements and easy access to loans for personal needs including transport during obstetric emergencies increased willingness to save with saving groups. Saving groups therefore provided a safety net for the poor during emergencies. Poor management of saving groups and detrimental economic practices like gambling constrained saving. Efficient running of saving groups requires that they have a clear management structure, which is legally registered with relevant authorities and that it is governed by a constitution. Conclusions: Saving groups were considered a useful form of saving that enabled easy access to cash for birth preparedness and transportation during emergencies. They are like ‘a sprouting bud that needs to be nurtured rather than uprooted’, as they appear to have the potential to act as a safety net for poor communities that have no health insurance. Local governments should therefore strengthen the management capacity of saving groups so as to ensure their efficient running through partnerships with non-governmental organizations that can provide support to such groups

Designing scalable microservices : Case: AWS with Python

The object of the thesis was to design and develop a prototype of a backend application used to serve data for a feed-based social media application. The requirements for the application design were to incorporate authentication, a process for storing photos, effective enough reads and writes of the feed data, as well as to retain modularity for both future scaling and testing. One of the technical requirements was running the application on Amazon Web Services (AWS), with an emphasis on utilizing its Lambdas for serverless architecture. Other AWS resources used were S3, RDS, EC2 and SQS. The application logic was written using Python-based frameworks. Flask was used for API and general server logic, while SQLAlchemy's engine was utilized for Object Relational Mapping on PostgreSQL databases. Marshmallow handled any serialization needed for outgoing and incoming data. Application Lambda's access to the AWS re-sources was managed by Boto3. For deployment it was necessary to have an easily integrated and lightweight deployment tool and Zappa was chosen for this task. The result of the work was a working prototype, which supports scalability and has served as a basis for client’s application as well as in another project the designer has worked in