Working on the Collaborative Africa Budget Reform Initiative (CABRI) website was a unique experience for all involved.
It required a whole new website that was quite technical in nature, but still needed to be user friendly and easily navigable. It also required a new design, the transfer of all existing content from the old website to the new one, as well as additional content creation and uploads. What set CABRI apart from many other websites was the level of innovation required to deliver on this.
CABRI is an intergovernmental organisation providing a “peer-learning and exchange network” for senior officials working in African finance ministries and involved in planning – basically a network of country budget officials across the continent.
The network acts as a catalyst and facilitator. Through its work and constant evaluation of the in-country processes and pressing issues that African nations face, CABRI seeks to effect change in countries, focusing on the management of public finances. The organisation does this through various avenues, such as dialogues between members and stakeholders and peer learning between finance ministries.
At CABRI’s core is its belief that public financial resources must be handled with integrity, transparency and accountability to ensure improvement within Africa’s financial sectors and better living standards for people on the continent. CABRI believes this is the only way to arrive at efficient, effective service delivery, sustainable economic growth and development within the countries.
For this reason, there are academics and learning institutions involved across all spheres of the organisation and this needed to be reflected across the site.
“The website project was a collaborative effort between the Flow project team and the CABRI Secretariat. This multilanguage site took careful planning to ensure that all content was neatly organised and easily accessible to the user,” said Roshni Nana, project manager on the CABRI job.
“The assignment put senior developers Stephen Frank and Tinashe Gunda to the test, and through clever programming and added functionality we were able to deliver on the client’s brief,” she added.
The CABRI site is a knowledge hub consisting of copious amounts of information in the form of documents and publications. It acts as the primary source of information for CABRI’s members and stakeholders. Due to this magnitude of information, the website had to have extensive categorising and indexing functionality to ensure ease of searching and allow for resource downloads.
It also had to enable fast and easy access to the various documents and publications on the website and had to be multilingual – French, English and Portuguese. As the content person on the CABRI project, I had to collaborate with all involved, ensuring that translations were in place and that it all worked together. Content needed to be clear and concise and publications had to be linked to the correct blogs, news items and so on.
It also meant the functionality and user experience (UX) of the website were constantly evaluated and the developers were continuously tasked with streamlining the site’s functions.
“It was exciting pushing the framework – to find ways to extend and bring new light to the way we work with our tools,” said website developer Tinashe Gunda of the CABRI project.
CABRI emerged with a customised website, and the organisation’s staff received full Craft CMS training on the website’s back end to equip them to upload news, documents and publications and to make other updates as required.