My Scholarship Info Consultancy management system: Technology meets the challenge
Date
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Over the years, both the government and the private sector have made several efforts to increase the number of educated youths in sub-Saharan Africa. Nevertheless, many students, especially from underprivileged backgrounds, lack access to higher education. My Scholarship Info (MSI) is a higher education consultancy that seeks to tackle this problem by identifying, admitting, and providing students from sub-Saharan Africa with higher educational opportunities. This startup, however, needs a system to help automate its processes. A series of literature reviews showed that the current consultancy systems available are standalone and expensive to integrate for a startup. After a careful requirement analysis through interviews, observations, and surveys, the developer discovered that My Scholarship Info needs an efficient system to automate recruiting students, customer service, payments, and more. Thus, this capstone project was undertaken successfully to develop the said system known as the MSI Higher Education Consultancy Management System (HECMS). The HECMS has an application portal, a payment system, an AI chatbot, and two dashboards for admins and students. The HECMS will assist MSI in connecting high school students from sub-Saharan Africa, especially those from underserved backgrounds, to higher educational opportunities, thus contributing to SDGs 4 and 10.