Bal Suraksha Abhiyan, West Bengal, India

Who are BSA?
Bal Suraksha Abhiyan (BSA) Trust, based in Kalimpong in the eastern state of West Bengal, India, is focused on child labor prevention and child protection. BSA Trust also responds to Childline (India’s child abuse hotline) calls in Kalimpong and supports police across three states in tracing missing children and child abuse investigations. 

BSA Trust currently oversees 120 children in their alternative placements “homes,” with many of these children remaining in BSA Trust homes until adulthood (18 years of age). BSA Trust provides homes, healthcare, schooling and independent living skills. The funds for BSA Trust services come from individual donors, international NGO networks (e.g., Caritas and World Vision) and the Indian government. 

The challenge
The Child Protection Workers of BSA Trust work with vigilance committees and local schools in different villages. BSA Trust workers regularly communicate and collaborate with these local communities to identify potential child labor violations, child abuse situations and missing or runaway children. New cases also come in through the hotline manned by the BSA Trust. 

The worker’s coverage area includes the Himalayan hillsides. Workers travel long distances to meet new clients, and to maintain connections with existing clients. Initially, BSA Trust was paper-based and had no electronic case management solution. This meant that workers had to bring hand-written notes, assessments, and forms back to the central BSA Trust office in person. All data captured in notebooks about children, their communities and case related information was copied and stored in paper files in their office. This process was inefficient and time-consuming.

The solution
BSA Trust partnered with Diona to implement Diona Visits, on Android phones, for their caseworkers and supervisors. With the use of Diona Visits and Diona Data Manager, BSA Trust caseworkers and supervisors can now digitally maintain child protection/trafficking-related cases, and capture notes and assessments from their mobile device both while offline and online. They can also capture child, community and school data and spend more time in the field doing good, rather than in the office doing administrative work.  

As part of the implementation, Diona digitized all forms used by BSA Trust, using logic to simplify them where possible. As BSA Trust workers typically work in remote mountain terrain with little or no access to any network, offline capabilities of Diona Visits are proving invaluable for the case workers to carry out their core mandate of protecting vulnerable children. The implementation also included community level surveys, such as India’s Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). 

The solution is completely cloud-based, and hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform. The project implementation (completed in just six weeks) included configuring Diona Visits for the unique needs of BSA Trust and deployment to Microsoft Azure. The BSA Trust team is now utilizing Diona solutions to serve the children and communities more effectively.