Founded in 2002, Aptivate is a UK based NGO that provides IT services for international development. It works on both grant funded projects and direct partnerships with NGOs to help them to solve their IT challenges, particularly with low bandwidth, high data volume needs.  

 

Mission

Aptivate believes in the power of knowledge and communication to alleviate poverty, suffering and conflict, and in the right of every individual to inform and be informed.

 

We are dedicated to developing ICT services that facilitate communication for unconnected communities, empowering ordinary people across the developing world to improve their lives.

 

What We Do

We collaborate with NGOs to strengthen the use of IT in their programmes, offer impartial advice on strategy, policy, implementation and procurement and build robust, accessible and usable software, mobile and web services. We are experts in low-bandwidth and appropriate technologies and leaders in the field of bandwidth management, improving communications networks.

 

To date, we have provided consultancy for projects funded by DTI, DFID, WHO and UNFAO. Some of our projects have included training rural women in Zambia in IT usage; Creating an online data capture system for maternal health indicators for the Clinton Health Access Initiative; Creating a monitoring and evaluation application to help tackle unemployment in Nigeria and researching the impacts of technology in Zambian classrooms.

 

We also carry out projects in our own areas of interest, mainly focused on increasing global access to web resources. We do this by promoting low-bandwidth web design; making tools to help network managers, and people browsing the web in less well connected environments; and providing training workshops and resources. We mainly work on Linux environments, with a couple of client-specific projects that are Windows-based (e.g. Microsoft Access systems). We’re currently developing in Django/Python and PHP, using Python where we have a choice. Some of our older projects which we work on from time to time are Java-based.