Living Progress - Build - WCS - Integrate Android app with backend

Welcome to the HP LPC - Women's Community Savings Android app - update prototype challenge.  This project aims at creating a e-ledger mobile application that helps to simplify record keeping by digitizing it, thereby increase accuracy and improve data security. We've run multiple challenges so far and built out a native Android prototype app and the backend Nodejs microservices. We now want to integrate the native Android app with the backend services as part of this challenge.

Problem:

 

75% of the world’s poorest people do not have a formal bank account. Currently there is a solution to these people and it’s called community-based savings groups (also known as village banks) which are specifically designed and targeted to meet the needs of the rural poor for whom access to even the most basic financial services is extremely limited.

 

Client’s award-winning “WORTH Savings-group program” has reached nearly 400,000 women in 14 countries. It is important to understand what this program is about in-order to create this mobile application:

 

- Poor, primarily rural women get together in groups of 25 with a women’s economic empowerment model that integrates savings-led microfinance, literacy and numeracy, group banking, and micro-enterprise development, while strengthening social networks and empowering women to have a voice in their communities.

- Participants in each of the groups save/credit money on a weekly basis.

- The group’s savings are pooled, managed by the group independently, and available in short-term, low- interest loans to members, primarily for income generation.

- At the end of the six-month financial cycle, interest earned is distributed proportionately to group member’s savings, and members can decide to spend or to save it during the next cycle.

 

Currently, when the groups come together for their weekly meetings, all of the village bank transactions are recorded in each of the ledgers by hand. Group financial activity is currently tracked through paper, a system which is time-consuming and with greater opportunity for errors. The handwritten updating of ledgers is very cumbersome and vulnerable to errors - those errors, in turn, are very difficult to reconcile across the varied forms. So, there is an opportunity to further improve this program to more effectively serve its participants

 

Solution - The e-Ledger:

A shift from labor-intensive, handwritten paper records to digital accounting would drastically reduce banking transaction costs and the women’s opportunity costs for WORTH participation. This would also allow the client to enhance and improve existing training on micro-business and capital usage for existing groups while also including more women in the program.

 

This will be an online system (mobile  app) to simplify record keeping, increase accuracy and improve data security:

 

- This mobile application would facilitate the existing record keeping - credits, debits, lending activities, lending calculators, loan repayment schedules, loan tracking, portfolio reporting.

 

Current Status

- The Android prototype has been bulit for phone and tablet and currently uses hardcoded data
- The backend services and data model are built
- We are providing a mapping of each screen and corresponding API endpoints


To fully understand the various roles in the app as well as functionality, please go through the below document.
 

Android App Requirements

Scope

- For this challenge, we'd like you to update the existing Android Studio project with the provided Nodejs backend.  It is easy to run the Nodejs backend & PostgreSQL database locally by following the instructions provided in the repository.

 

Key Considerations

 

- There should be no hardcoded data in the app. All screens must fetch data from corresponding backend service

- Ensure there are no memory leaks & no crashes

- Follow Android best practices as mentioned here