The Education Grant Service Line (EGSL) at the Regional Service Centre Entebbe (RSCE) has recently implemented a paperless method of moving documents within the various stages of review in processing Education Grant submissions from field staff.

The EGSL unit processes all education grant requests for international civilian staff members serving field missions in Africa and handles approximately 8,000 transactions annually. The team is embarking on the training of all staff on the use of this new method of digitizing all the documents received in the processing of Education Grant’s.

With a 4-stage review and approval system in place, and considering an average of 6 pages per submission, the EGSL aims to save an estimated 24,000 sheets of paper annually. This will be made possible through the use of Acrobat 8.

Once the staff member uploads their documents in the plate form used by the Center for collecting Education Grant’s document the Field Support Suite – FSS) and submits for RSCE review, the documents are then sent to the Reviewer who will convert the document in PDF using Acrobat 8 and can electronically add comments onto the document directly, before sending it to the next stage of the review without having to print a single piece of paper.

The team has also launched a workflow monitoring tool that helps track and monitor each and every EG submission, to further ensure that submissions are processed in a timely fashion.

Furthermore, the RSCE had also increased the number of EG Approvers to 5 and coupled with this new tool, aims to achieve a faster and more efficient way of processing EG’s. The archived EG submissions that have been taking up a lot of space in the warehouse are being digitized and this will likewise support the Organization’s goal of making the planet greener.