Overview of My Submission
The inspiration
Village Banking is a phenomenon that has gained popularity in my country and most African countries, there is a version of it in the U.S as well with a different name. Most small village banking groups keep track of their finances in whatsapp messages or by one person. What is village banking you ask?
Village banking is a microcredit methodology whereby financial services are administered locally rather than centralized in a formal bank. Village banking has its roots in ancient cultures and was most recently adopted for use by micro-finance institutions (MFIs) as a way to control costs. Definition from wikipedia
The Solution
The solution to people using excel sheets or tracking the village banking money through messages is a web application that can be used on a mobile phone or desktop.
How I built it
This application started its life as a react native application but was then switched to react to reach more people than a mobile app can.
It is a react app with Material UI for the look and feel. On the mongo side it is a MongoDB Realm application using an atlas database, realm functions and realm triggers.
Challenges I went through
I had a couple of challenges:
- I haven't developed in react or react native in over a year so I had to dust of some of the rust
- I had a couple of issues understanding how roles affect how you can access data in a mongo db collection from a realm application.
- Understanding realm sync destructive changes (the documentation was pretty helpful here)
- Time is an ever present challenge, switching halfway through to react certainly took some time and doing it during the Christmas break was not ideal.
Accomplishments I'm proud of
- I have a working application integrated with MongoDB Realm
- I have deployed a version of the application
Things I learned
- MongoDB Realm: Almost everything under realm, Authentication, functions, triggers, Schema and values
- React native: It was basically like learning react native again after over 2 years of not developing it.
- Integrating libraries like Twilio with MongoDB Realm
What's next for village banking
The following is the roadmap for village banking
- Adding loan requests for users of village banking groups
- Adding profile editing
- Complete the sms and email notifications
- Develop a mobile application
- Writing up bite sized tutorials on MongoDB Realm.
Submission Category:
My submission is in the Action Star category and uses realm functions and triggers.
To view the deployed demo please check this link
Link to Code
kachaMukabe
/
village-banking
A web based village banking application
Village Banking
This is a web application for village banking Definition from wikipedia.
Demo
Please find link to project here
Features
- Create/Join Village Banking groups
- Deposit Money
- View deposits for the whole group
- Sms notifications using Twilio
Lessons Learned
What did you learn while building this project? What challenges did you face and how did you overcome them?
Roadmap
- Adding the ability for group users to request for loans on the app
- Profile editing
- Email notifications as an alternative for sms
- Mobile application
The realm backend code can also be found in the repository in the folder called backend.
Additional Resources / Info
Used Libraries:
React
MongoDB
Twilio
Screenshots
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