Customer stories - Village by Village

Roan Lavery
CEO, Co-founder

I’m always interested to hear the different ways in which FreeAgent is being used by our customers, but when Neil Kerfoot got in touch I was amazed by his story.

For his 40th birthday back in 2006, instead of throwing a fancy party Neil decided to build a well in a remote rural village in Ghana. That act of altruism took on a life of its own and Neil now runs Village by Village, a grassroots charity working with communities in Africa to provide education, healthcare and other basic human rights.

Many of these villages do not have electricity but most have 3G network capability, so all Village by Village staff are issued with cheap smartphones and use the FreeAgent Mobile app to record expenses and projects costs. It also allows local workers to capture receipts of items (like bags of cement) and upload them to FreeAgent via the app.

This means that Village by Village can see charity money being spent on funded projects in real time, with real proof of purchases, in some of the most remote parts of the world - all thanks to an ingenious application of FreeAgent.

Village by Village are always on the lookout for donations and volunteers so take a look at their website for more details.