My Project-GECEC

What exactly is my project you might ask? Well, let me tell you all about it.

GECEC stands for La Generale d'Epargne et de Credit de l'est Cameroun. Basically we are a small Credit Union based in Lomie, Cameroon that opened in 2000. GECEC includes a staff of 11 including me, the volunteer.

My primary job with GECEC is to develop a banking system to automate transaction processing, accounts reconciliation and all the necessary reports for overseeing the credit union, and also to train the staff in using not only the accounting system but Windows and MS Office in general. My mandate also includes management training for the Director and improving the business infrastructure at all levels, as GECEC is a very new institution.

This is somewhat of a monumental task to perform in 6 months, but as of November we have begun testing and if all goes well we will go live with the system starting in January.

 I will put up some more information about the technical aspects of the project later, but for now I will say that after some hair pulling I decided to use MS Access and VBA to create the system. I did this for 3 main reasons. Firstly, using Access will make the system fairly stable as Access is in itself quite reliable. Therefore the only problems that SHOULD arise are those that I create. Second, GECEC already has Access on their computer and it is properly licensed. Therefore there is no problem with having to install pirated software or trying to find the money to buy a license. Last but not least, although I will have to dig into VBA a little bit, using Access with limit the amount of coding I have to do to specific procedures and not encompass the whole project. For someone who is not by trade a programmer this is possibly the most important.

November 3, 2002

Well, we begin testing (breaking) the system this coming week and hopefully the staff will have completed entering all the member data into the system by the time I get back to Lomie on Tuesday the 5th. At this point the system handles all member data including accounts and transactions. I have not yet begun on the reports or tables created using queries off of this initial data. I have been working like a dog the last month to get back on schedule and although I am getting tired of 12 hour days I can happily say I am ahead of schedule and this should give me a bit of a cushion for the inevitable glitches that pop up. During the testing period (November) I will not only be fixing bugs that crop up, but creating all the necessary back end reports for reconciliation purposes and trying to make the interface as user friendly as possible while still enforcing data integrity. I have already run into small problems on that front as I had to remove data validation for all of the member information as many people here don't know their birthdate or don't have an address or identity card. It is things like this that you would never have thought of that make this job very interesting and exciting!

For those techies who might be interested I will put a link to a page with all the technical info and some screen shots of the program next time I am in Yaounde at the end of November.