Background

Two years ago I was commissioned by The Maldives Country Office of Unicef to undertake a scoping exercise and write a specification for a multi-agency, national child protection database for the Republic of Maldives.  Over a two month period Jim and I met with workers involved with child protection cases from many government agencies and in particular the Family Child Protection Unit of the Maldives Police Service.  We were whizzed around in high speed police launches and flown to islands in more distant atolls in the Maldives. 

Two years on and we are back, this time to build and implement the database system and train its users who will working from islands spanning 500 miles across the Indian Ocean.

This is emphatically not a holiday (!) although I consider it to be the experience of a lifetime and one of the more important and rewarding projects I have worked on in my professional career.

Male', capital of the Maldives.  2 square kilometers in area and home to 100,000 Maldivians and 70,000 migrant workers, it is one of the most densely populated places on the planet and under the greatest threat from rise in sea levels due to global warming. 


As a recent demonstration of the seriousness of the situation, the Maldives government held an underwater cabinet meeting.