Are you a Full-Stack Developer looking for a rewarding side project in support of a refugee charity?
About Xavier Project
Xavier Project is a UK-registered charity that supports refugees in Kenya and Uganda. The main focus of our work is supporting refugee-led organisations: these are grassroots groups of varying sizes that are at the front line of their communities’ aid and development. In contrast to big international NGOs and UN organisations that dominate the sector at large, these refugee-led organisations are embedded within refugee communities and know their needs better than anyone else. They also receive a tiny fraction of the funding that international organisations enjoy — and despite the global humanitarian sector agreeing in 2016 to redress this balance, to date, no meaningful change has been made.
About the Opportunity
Xavier Project is looking for an expert consultant to help us revamp our website Reframe, www.reframe.network, which showcases the potential of these refugee-led organisations and connects them to international donors, partners, opportunities and resources. The site is in a beta/prototype stage at the moment but has live profiles of real refugee-led organisations. Ultimately, we want this site to catalyse change in the sector: to help refugee-led organisations get a higher percentage of global aid funding and to be wholly enfranchised into the sector that claims to support them.
The site currently uses the LAMP stack and is hosted on AWS. Most of its functionality is written from scratch in PHP, and its front-end uses vanilla CSS, HTML and (some) Javascript. To help the project reach its full potential, a rethink of the site’s entire technology stack and UX is needed. The site in its current state was developed by one of our staff members in-house in partnership with people from 2 of our partner refugee-led organisations. While all are self-taught programmers, none have the professional experience needed to make the site the best it can be — that’s where you come in!
How you can help us
We’re looking for the assistance of an experienced full-stack web developer who has an interest in working on a humanitarian project, who is willing to consult and mentor our team for a period of 3 to 4 weeks (or longer, if you’re interested) to help us redesign and recreate Reframe and help us make it the best it can be. The resulting web app will help refugee-led organisations showcase their work to global audiences, connect with donors, and maybe even change the sector at large.
- You’ll be working closely with our Project Development Lead (who developed the current iteration of Reframe) as well as a junior Web Developer, both based in Kenya. Both do not have as much experience as you and are very willing to learn from yours.
- While the current iteration of the site is written in PHP and is hosted on AWS, we are not married to these technologies and are very open to changing our stack. Your input here is invaluable: if you’re a ME(A/R/?)N stack developer, a WordPress developer, a proponent of Firebase, Heroku, Azure etc over AWS… we are open to all ideas.
- While we are able to compensate you for your time, it will almost certainly not be at the market rate that you are used to. The flipside of this is that your engagement will be entirely on your terms, for a project that can help change the way aid for refugees works.
For more info or to express interest, please reach out to Dex at d.findley@xavierproject.org and we’ll take the conversation further.
