Sri Lankan mobile operator Dialog supporting FOG

When I prepared my volunteer project in Germany I contacted the mobile operator Dialog in Sri Lanka. Dialog is Vodafone's partner network in Sri Lanka as Vodafone has no direct presence in this country. With the help of some very supportive colleagues at Vodafone I got the contacts of the COO and CTO. I send an email describing my project and soon after got a positive response from Supun Werasinghe, the Chief Operating Officer of Dialog in Sri Lanka. He introduced me to Michael de Soyza who is heading the department of social affairs. With this connection set up I went to Sri Lanka and started my work. I always kept the Dialog connection in mind but the first weeks here were quite a struggle for me as I had some problems to obtain the appropriate visa. At the beginning I also had no clue how Dialog could help other than providing cash or equipment. My intention was to setup a sustainable partnership and not one time donation. 

A few weeks ago I contacted Dialog again with some ideas on how to cooperate with the Foundation of Goodness. Dialog was luckily still willing to help and Yesterday we had a meeting with Michael de Soyza at the FOG centre in Seenigama. It was a very fruitful discussion and Michael came up with some interesting ideas for Dialog's potential support:

1. Medical Centre
• Provide capability for video surgery in case of additional assistance of medical experts is needed. With this capability (video application and dedicated internet line) it is possible to incorporate medical experts from all over the world
• Provide health care applications. Examples: web based patient database or sms application which is able to send reminder sms to patients treated in the Seenigama medical centre. The reminder sms can be individually configured to the patients medical treatment (e.G. 3 sms per day reminding the patient to take the list of drugs to take)
2. Business services
• Implementation of SME Toolkit. Dialog has already vast experience in enabling their salesforce (partnering shops) to enhance their business through the SME Toolkit. It needs to be assessed how FOG could avail on this
• Tradenet.lk is a mobile application which brings together people who offer or need specific things. It's a bit like ebay but also different as it only brings together people via sms/email based on their profile on the platform
3. Children's club
• Dialog has a portal where customers can buy pictures for mobile wallpapers. The children in the pre school and the children's club are drawing a lot of pictures during their time they spent at FOG. These pictures could be photographed and then be uploaded to the Dialog's web portal where customers could buy these pictures.
4. IT
• The FOG IT education centre in Seenigama qualifies a lot of people of the rural community in the Southern Province of Sri Lanka. Dialog maybe can set up an ICT Application Development lab where applications can be tested by the students and Dialog gets the consolidated feedback looped back as input for further development. If the students are skilled enough the could even develop applications for Dialog.

These are the results of the first session yesterday. We will follow up in the next weeks to detail the concept and carve out the necessary steps to take from both sides. I'm really happy that a simple email to the COO of Dialog turned out to the beginning of a promising partnership between Dialog and FOG. I'm sure my FOG colleagues will sustain the momentum we now created to build up the Dialog partnership. I will anyway keep an eye on it when I'm back in Germany... :-)